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i^tal Religion 



HOWARD ALLEN BRIDGMAN 



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REAL RELIGION 



REAL RELIGION 



FRIENDLY TALKS TO THE AVERAGE MAN 
ON CLEAN AND USEFUL LIVING 



BY 

HOWARD ALLEN BRIDGMAN 

Author of ''Steps Christward'' 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



31 



\ 

5 



Copyright, iqio 
By Luther H. Cary 



THE* PLIMPTON 'PRESS 

[WD-O] 
NORWOOD "MASS* U 'S'A 



©CI,A273534 



MY CHILDREN 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

A Straight Word on Religion i 

"One World at a Time" 5 

The Luck of the Road 9 

The First Thoughts on Waking • 14 

Trolley-Car Theology 18 

"As Good as the Average" 22 

" That Little Streak of Religion "..... 26 

To One Soured on Life 30 

The Fun of Beginning Again 34 

The Contagion of Good Cheer 38 

The Large in the Little 42 

Running by the Signals • 46 

The Buried Life • 50 

The Drummer's Sunday 54 

Fixed Ideas • 58 

" After You, Please " . 62 

"She Could, She Would, She Did" 65 

"Be Somebody" 69 

"How IS Business.^*" .......... 72 

Off Days 76 

"Same Old Job" 80 

The Courage to Part with Things 84 

Life on Easy Street 88 

The Standstills of Life 92 

Snap Judgments 95 

The Art of Appreciation 99 |^ 

Our Human Islands 102 

The Reserves in Human Nature 107 

The Good Listener iii 

Human Beings as Links 115 

[vii] 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

One Good Life 119 

A Man and His Echo 123 

The Mother's Part 127 

All Hail to the Breadwinner 131 

"Fond of His Folks" 135 

A Home-Maker 138 

What Shall the Middle-Aged Man Do? . . . 142 

This Next Week's Friendliness 146 

When is a Man Old? 149 

Why Go to Church? 154 

The Question Why 158 

Where Do People Go When They Die? .... 162 

The One-Legged Boy's Thankfulness .... 166 

The Good-Will Company Unlimited 170 

The Man Who Came Back 174 

The Charm of the Impossible 178 

The Man You Might Be 182 



[ viii ] 



FOREWORD 

THIS is not a book for scholars, though 
the author hopes that his construing 
of religion is not at variance with scholarship. 
Neither is it a book for saints; yet if any of 
its words shall strengthen their serene and 
tested faith, the author will be glad. It 
is a book for the man and the woman in 
the midst of the moral struggle, exposed 
to the materialism and the pessimism of 
our age. And it comes from one who would 
have them regard him, not as an ethical 
teacher or a spiritual adviser, but as their 
fellow soldier and their friend. 



[ix] 



I! 



REAL RELIGION 



A STRAIGHT WORD ON RELIGION 

THE swift passing of the years can 
hardly fail to make us thoughtful. 
What does it all mean — this rapid flight 
of time? Is there any clue to the mystery? 
Long as life may be, in the case of any of 
us, it is short at best. Seventy, eighty, 
even ninety years are a brief span compared 
with the sweep of eternity. If there is any- 
thing certain in this uncertain world it is 
that we shall not be here long. The vast 
majority of us will speedily be forgotten. 
Is there anything that can give dignity and 
significance to these transient years? 

Only one answer to this question has 
satisfied the heart of man. Religion alone, 
personal religion, gives meaning and glory 
to life; and the irreligious man, whatever else 
he may be, honest, kind, generous, fails to 
grasp life's real riches. I am not speaking 
now of one religion as distinct from an- 
other or of the fine distinctions within the 

[I] 



REAL RELIGION 



pale of a given religion, say Christianity. 
I have in mind rather the religious spirit 
which underlies all religious forms and which 
often unites those whose outward observ- 
ances are quite unlike even though they 
ignore this inner tie. So when I urge a 
man to be religious I do not ask him first 
of all to accept my creed or attend my 
church. I bid him rather connect his life, 
as he will, with that great force called religion, 
which he already knows is the secret of the 
world's progress and the power behind the 
lives of the best men and women whom the 
world has ever known. Two or three things 
I deem to be essential. 

You must submit your life to this higher 
power. You must trust and obey it. The 
heart of religion is some form of submission. 
You must confess that you are not strong 
or wise enough to go alone. You must 
put your ambitions, your hopes, your capaci- 
ties in the keeping of one worthy to be 
trusted and loved and served. In other 
words, you must become a child again and 
lean hard upon a strength and wisdom that 
are not your own. There is only one class 
of persons who can never be truly religious. 
They are the proud and the self-sufficient. 

[2] 



A STRAIGHT WORD 

You must pray. You must cultivate an 
intimacy with this higher power. Your 
prayers need not be long or conventional, 
but they ought to be frequent and genuine. 
No matter if praying comes hard at first, 
persist and the practise will be easier and 
increasingly rewarding. Don't stop to theo- 
rize or philosophize on the subject, but learn 
to speak to God as simply and as naturally 
as children talk to their parents. Not all 
your prayers will be answered. As you 
keep on praying you will care less and less 
for that, but prayer persisted in brings its 
own assurance that it pays to pray, that a 
man is not wasting his breath, but is com- 
muning with the Almighty. 

One thing more. The religious mood 
depends for its sustenance also on the right 
kind of food. There is a book which looms 
far above all other books in its power to 
inform and kindle the spirit of man as he 
seeks to have commerce with his Creator. 
I do not claim for the Bible every merit 
which some of its too zealous friends claim, 
but I am sure that it is essential to the build- 
ing up and perfecting of the religious life. 

Such are some of the basal elements of 
personal religion. Why not, my friend, 

[31 



REAL RELIGION 



have a religion of your own? Why wait 
till everything is explained? Why be dis- 
couraged because you started a long time 
ago and failed? 



[4] 



"ONE WORLD AT A TIME'' 

" T TE is one of those fellows who 
JL JL believes in only one world at a 
time," commented a sagacious, elderly man 
upon a youth of marked ability who is, 
nevertheless, an out and out agnostic. No 
Epicurean of old ever took more pains to 
tickle his palate or to please his esthetic 
sensibilities. His conception of this world 
where he will probably stay a few years 
longer is that of an orange from which he 
should extract all possible savory nutriment, 
and to which he is under no obligation to 
contribute anything that makes for its 
uplift. 

There are a good many of them — these 
one-world-at-a-time fellows — and on the sur- 
face there is much to justify them in the 
attitude they take. This is a very good 
world, a vital, rich, throbbing world which 
responds in a wonderful number of ways 
to our craving for sensuous gratification. 
Science and invention are multiplying con- 
stantly the devices that add to our ease 
and comfort. We have but to press the 

[si 



REAL RELIGION 



button and clever mechanisms do the rest. 
Moreover we have outgrown the old-fashioned 
notion that we have no right to the whole- 
some pleasures which this world yields. 
We have ceased to tell young people that 
they are not to delight themselves in ordi- 
nary recreations lest their soul should be 
in danger of perdition. In the first place, 
young people wouldn't believe it if we told 
them so, and in the second place, it isn't 
true. The Bible itself says: "He hath made 
every thing beautiful in its time." "God 
giveth us richly all things to enjoy." 

At the same time, that theory of life 
which would limit it to interest in things 
seen and tangible breaks down at certain 
points. It does not help us in the moral 
struggle when our better natures assert 
themselves and would rise above the things 
that drag us down to earth. Furthermore, 
we tire at times of incessant rounds of 
pleasure. Even brownstone mansions and 
six thousand dollar touring cars cannot 
satisfy certain moods of our minds. 

Again, we cannot shut out the other 

world if we would. As the poet says, "It 

lies around us like a cloud." Something 

happens to bring it very near. There is 

[6] 



"ONE WORLD AT A TIME" 

a death in the family or on the street, or 
our own physical powers begin to decline, 

" We long for household faces gone, 
For vanished forms we long." 

At such times the - theory that there is 
only one world for us becomes almost in- 
tolerable. We look around and see those 
who have succeeded in dwelling in both 
worlds, to whom one is almost as real as 
the other, who while taking the true delight 
in books, music, painting, travel, human 
fellowship, and even in good things to eat 
and good things to wear, find also an even 
higher satisfaction in the things which the 
eye does not see nor the hand touch. They 
honestly believe that they are denizens of 
two worlds and that they lose a great deal 
out of their lives when they confine them- 
selves to one. 

Sometime even the one-world-at-a-time 
men may wake up and find themselves 
wofuUy mistaken. We are not forecasting 
their plight then, but it is folly to try to 
wall out here and now the world of spiritual 
realities. The one-world-at-a-time people 
may not suffer hereafter in just the way 
the stiff theologies have affirmed they would, 
but how strange that country must seem 

[7] 



REAL RELIGION 



to them when they reach it, having made 
no preparation for it while here. Certainly 
if one were going to Europe sometime he 
would, if possible, make some preparation 
for it. He would occasionally read a book 
that tells about it, or talk with somebody 
who had been there, or let his mind in imag- 
ination some quiet Sunday evening roam 
toward that delectable country which he 
hoped to see some day. Then, when he 
went, he would not be altogether dazed 
or find the atmosphere too rare for him, or 
show himself at every turn in the journey 
a novice or an ignoramus. 



[8] 



THE LUCK OF THE ROAD 

IN that charming novel entitled "Felicity," 
and depicting the modern stage and the 
life of the people who figure on it, the phrase 
"The luck of the road" again and again 
appears. It is frequently on the lips of 
the hero of the book, the Old Man, and he 
always uses it to cheer the members of his 
company when they get down in the mouth. 
His point was that having accepted the 
romantic and uncertain life of their profession 
they should not whine over its "outs," 
but should rather exhibit a soldierly spirit 
and extract all the comfort and pleasure 
they could out of even hard experiences 
and situations. And this genial philosophy 
governed the Old Man not only in relation 
to his troupe, but in his dealings with all 
whom he met. 

Perhaps a theater can sometimes teach 
the pulpit a lesson. At any rate, there is 
a deal of gospel sense in this view of life. 
For we are all "up against it" in one way 
and another. Whether we go abroad or 
stay at home, whether we work for ourselves 

[9] 



REAL RELIGION 



or work for others, whether we wear broad- 
cloth or homespun, we are all amenable to 
the luck of the road. If we have chosen a 
profession or trade, there will be some 
inevitable limitations and drawbacks con- 
nected with it. If we have married a wife 
or husband, perhaps he or she will be one 
or two notches short of perfection. If we 
have centered all our hopes on some beauti- 
ful expectation it may fail us; or, if not, 
the reality may fall far below the anticipa- 
tion. And before we know it, we will be 
in the mood of the little girl who moaned, 
"The world is hollow. My doll is made of 
sawdust, and I want to be a nun.'' 

But is that the right spirit in which to 
meet life as it comes to us? Isn't it far 
better to accept the luck of the road, rather 
than to kick against it.f^ It may help us to 
submission to remember that our case is 
never so exceptional as it seems. We all get 
in the habit of looking at our woes through 
the end of the telescope that magnifies 
them; and then we reverse the instrument 
and look at other folks' troubles, and how 
small they seem! But get down to the 
heart of that well-gowned lady of society, 
that prosperous business man, and maybe 

[lO] 



LUCK OF THE ROAD 

his luck will seem as hard as yours. The 
longer I live, the more I am impressed 
with the universality of discipline and sorrow. 
If it doesn't come in one form, it usually 
comes in another. The skies may be fair 
day after day, but depend upon it, the clouds 
will come and very few people indeed are 
able to live out many years and never have 
to look back upon loss, disappointment, 
pain, and hardship. 

It helps us also to look for the relieving 
features which are seldom absent from any 
experience. Standing on the front of a 
car the other night, I overheard a motor- 
man complaining about his luck — that it 
was all the one way and that a bad way. 
"Well, my friend," I remarked, "you look 
in mighty good physical condition. I envy 
you your physique and brawn." "Yes," 
he admitted, "I have hardly had a sick 
day in my life." "Are you married?" 
"Yes, only a few. months ago." "And you 
have a pretty good job?" "Yes, I have 
stuck to it six years." "Well," said I, 
"a man with health, home, and work isn't 
so badly off after all." And then I thought 
of another carman whom I know, whose 
wife has been in the insane asylum for 

[II] 



REAL RELIGION 



several years, and whose children have all 
died, and yet who never fails to wear a 
cheerful countenance, and I said to myself, 
^'How tremendously men differ in the way in 
which they take their luck!'' 

And one reason for the difference lies in 
the attitude they have toward other people's 
hard luck. Lend a hand to the fellow who 
is a little worse off than you, and you will 
find yourself taking a much more cheerful 
view of your own luck. When we begin 
to be helpers of individual human beings 
and cease being critics of the universe in 
general a brighter era in our own personal 
history begins. 

The people who down deep in their hearts 
believe that a good strong hand holds the 
helm of this universe are the ones who com- 
plain least over what happens. Away with 
the idea that the miscellaneous events of 
each passing day that are fraught with sor- 
row or joy for all mankind simply happen. 
Let's side with the man who cried out of 
his experience of harder luck than most 
of us have ever known, ^'AU things work 
together for good to them that love God." 
And let's side with that greater Man who 
saw into the heart of things when he said, 

[12] 



LUCK OF THE ROAD 

"Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, 
he taketh it away: and every branch that 
beareth fruit, he cleanseth it, that it may 
bear more fruit." 



[13I 



THE FIRST THOUGHTS ON WAKING 

A FATHER of my acquaintance makes 
it a point to be at the bedside of 
his little three-year-old boy as soon as he 
wakes every morning, and in the father's 
absence the mother is there. The idea 
is that the touch of the parent's love and 
interest upon the child as he comes back to 
consciousness after sleep is far better than 
that of a hired servant and is likely to 
prove of great and permanent worth in the 
child's development. 

Back of this instance of fatherly fore- 
thought is the fundamental principle that 
it is important for any one to start the day 
in the right mood. Who of us older people 
does not feel the need of some such sweeten- 
ing and steadying influence at the outset 
of each new day? Too often the cares of 
yesterday come trooping back as we slowly 
emerge from dreamland, and If some vexing 
problem must be dealt with during the next 
twenty-four hours, how quickly that comes 
before us also. If we could only secure, 
before the plunge into the whirlpool of 

[14] 



THOUGHTS ON WAKING 

activities, just a few minutes of happy, 
inspiring thoughts, what a difference it 
would make in the entire day! 

Our parents cannot long secure this desir- 
able mood for us, but our own wills, if 
resolute enough, can do much to induce it. 
Determine first of all that your waking 
thought shall not relate to yesterday's 
troubles and failures, but to today's oppor- 
tunities. The former have passed into his- 
tory. They were hard enough to bear at 
the moment. Why should we let them con- 
tinue to dog us ? Susan Coolidge has written 
nothing sweeter than the poem commencing. 

Every day is a new beginning, 
Every morn is the world made new." 

Send the thoughts forward then to all the 
chances of happiness and growth which the 
new day is sure to bring. O glorious new 
day, fresh from its Maker's hand, all golden 
with possibilities, as yet unscarred by our 
shortcomings! O glorious new day, we hail 
thee and rejoice that we are permitted to 
make our record cleaner and fairer. 

Let us think, too, of the goodness and not 
of the meannesses of our fellow men. If we 
have rubbed up against cranky individuals, 
if our lot is to be cast with those who thwart 

[IS] 



REAL RELIGION 



and fret us, let iis put over against such 
human annoyances those pure and noble 
lives with which we also may come in con- 
tact from day to day. Be thankful on waking 
that this old world still holds so many persons 
of this type. We may not this day touch 
many of them, but just to know that they 
are somewhere in the world radiating con- 
stantly truth and virtue ought to inspirit 
us as we rub our eyes, struggle into our 
clothes, and face again the old routine. 

And our waking thoughts ought surely to 
include some recognition of the divine 
protection and guidance that constantly 
surround our lives. Phillips Brooks once 
voiced his wonder as to how men could 
come back from unconsciousness to the 
world of action without sending their thoughts 
upward to the source of all life and blessing. 
Some families still maintain the beautiful 
custom either at breakfast-table or else- 
where of joining in some simple act of wor- 
ship. In view of all the risks and exposures 
to which every one is subject every day of his 
life, and in view of the limitations of one's 
strength and wisdom, it seems only natural 
and right to claim the care and leadership 
of a power, unseen but real, that holds all 
[i6] 



THOUGHTS ON WAKING 

humanity in its grasp. There is a little 
prayer of Robert Louis Stevenson's which 
suits itself to the break of day and which, 
if said honestly by any one, is sure to make 
the waking moments peaceful and happy: 

^'The day returns and brings us the petty 
round of irritating concerns and duties. 
Help us to play the man. Help us to 
perform them with laughter and kind faces. 
Let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give 
us to go blithely on our business all this 
day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and 
content and undishonored. And grant us in 
the end the gift of sleep." 



[17] 



TROLLEY-CAR THEOLOGY 

JAMMED together on the front of an 
electric car the other afternoon four 
of us, mainly strangers to one another, 
struck up an informal conversation. We 
were homeward bound, and the labors of 
the day being over, and the anticipations 
of the evening being keen, we were disposed 
to a little more familiarity than had we been 
headed toward our tasks at the day's begin- 
ning. But even then the conversation took 
a somewhat unexpected turn. 

One of the men had asked me about a cer- 
tain mutual acquaintance, and I had told him 
of her prostration by paralysis. ''What,'' 
said he, "has that saint been called upon 
to pass under the harrow.^ Why, I supposed 
she was so ripe for heaven, so free from 
blemish that she would go as Enoch or 
Elijah did, without suffering any of the dis- 
agreeable processes of decay and death." 

"Yes," I rejoined, "least of all women 
whom I know does she seem to need dis- 
ciplining at the hands of Providence. It's 
pretty hard to explain mysteries of this 
[i8] 



TROLLEY-CAR THEOLOGY 

sort. In fact, we need another world to 
right up the many injustices that we witness 
here." My interlocutor — who is an elderly 
man, and somewhat sad faced — went on 
to say that the most undeserving here seem 
often to experience most in the way of 
sorrow and hardship, while as to the other 
world he said, ''We don't know anything 
about that, for no one has ever come back 
from it." 

A period of silence followed this mournful 
observation which was broken by the motor- 
man's bold assertion, "One man has come 
back." 

"Pretty good for the motor-man," said 
the fourth member of our group, a jolly 
fellow in early middle life, and I at once 
took it upon me to support the motor-man's 
contention, saying, "Yes, indeed, I do be- 
lieve that one man came back, and that 
the world has not clung to that belief for 
nineteen centuries in vain," at which the 
jolly stranger said, "Sure enough, it can't 
be that all that is best in civilization and art 
and human life is built on a mere dream." 

The elderly cynic, while not disputing 
the proposition, began to comment upon 
the unsatisfactoriness and queerness of this 

[19] 



REAL RELIGION 



human world. "Three quarters of the in- 
habitants of the globe," said he, "have 
a desperately hard time to get along; they 
have scarcely enough to eat and to wear, 
while the other quarter have enough and 
to spare, and some of them more than 
enough." But the jovial member of the 
quartet would not let such a remark as 
that go unchallenged. He burst out with 
this ejaculation, "It's a bully world." 
Whereat I ventured to say, "Well, it's as 
good a world as any of us ever got into," 
and the motor-man said, " That's so." 

By this time we were nearing the transfer 
station and the group began to scatter, 
the motor-man remarking in his cheery 
Irish brogue, as we said good night to him 
and to one another, "This has been a very 
interestin' conversation." 

As I went up the street to my own dwell- 
ing, I mused how there on the front of 
the car the chief problems of theology had 
focused themselves. We four men, together 
for half an hour by pure accident, had in 
our talk reflected what is going on in the 
minds of people everywhere today when 
once they stop to think and lay bare to 
one another their inmost convictions. We 

[20] 



TROLLEY-CAR THEOLOGY 

were certainly a typical modern group. 
There was the cynic and the pessimist, a 
man who, as I happen to know, had acquired 
a good deal of property, but who looked 
forward to old age with foreboding and 
uncertainty of mind. There was the jolly, 
forward-looking optimist, who refused to 
be disheartened even by the painful facts 
of life, and there, too, was the plain man of 
the people, readier than any of us in the 
group to profess his unstudied, but confident 
faith that ^'Once a man came back." 

I shall not soon forget that talk on the 
front platform. It gave me hope touching 
the underlying soundness of the great major- 
ity of men in the essentials of the faith, 
and the words that will echo longest in 
my mind are these: "There was once a 
man who came back" and "This is a bully 
world." 



[21] 



^^AS GOOD AS THE AVERAGE'' 

^'T'M no saint, but I'm as good as the 
X average." How frequently a man says 
this, either to appease his own conscience 
or to justify in the eyes of others his be- 
havior. On the lips of many men it may 
be a true assertion, but when you come to 
think the matter through, is it really worth 
saying .f^ Is it any kind of a compliment.'^ 

If your health is no better than that of 
the average man it is nothing to boast of, 
for most persons have ailments or physical 
defects of one sort or another, and if you 
are no more prosperous than the average 
man you are certainly far from being well 
off. Do not the statistics tell us that a 
very large per cent of the men who go into 
business for themselves eventually have to 
make an assignment to their creditors.^ The 
average man today is likely to be hard up; 
he is probably more than ready for his 
wages or income the moment they are due. 
Quite likely he hardly makes both ends 
meet. Nor is the average man's knowledge 
very extensive or very accurate, and when 
[22] 



"GOOD AS THE AVERAGE" 

one comes to the field of morals, I heard 
some one, who said he was conversant with 
the situation, declare positively that the 
average man in the grocery business today 
is dishonest. Just why he instanced the 
grocery business as over against boots and 
shoes or stocks I cannot tell, unless it be 
that in the first mentioned pursuit it is 
so easy to sand the sugar or water the 
molasses. 

I think this far too severe an estimate, 
for the average man is not so unworthy a 
representative of our common humanity but 
we ought to be ashamed to set him up and 
compare ourselves with him, not aiming 
to surpass him in any particular. What 
he ought to be ambitious for is to bring up 
the general average of mankind. That means 
that we must be exceptional men, for there 
will always be enough to lower the average, 
and it behooves us to live and labor on 
a little higher plane than the average 
fellow. 

A standard was introduced into this world 
nineteen hundred years ago which ought to 
shame the man who runs to cover under 
the plea, "Fm as good as the average." 
It set up a lofty but by no means an im- 

[23] 



REAL RELIGION 



possible criterion of conduct. '^ Don't be 
satisfied with doing good to those who treat 
you squarely, but do good to the people 
who are mean and hateful to you. Give 
not merely even measure, but press down 
the contents of the basket and even let 
it run over. Go two miles with a man 
rather than one if he needs and wants you." 
It is this doctrine of excess, of extra service, 
of exceptional goodness that gives glory 
to human life. In it are wrapped up all 
the possibilities of noble character. Indeed, 
a man can hardly be said to have entered 
at all into the struggle for character who 
does not, at least faintly, apprehend the 
fact that he is called to be, not an average, 
but an exceptional man. 

"Are you afraid to dicf^'' asked a friend of 
a very sick man. "No," was the reply, "but 
I am ashamed to die." "Why?" "Because 
I haven't been a first-class Christian." 

If we really see life as it is, life as it may 
become, we shall never again dodge the 
issue by saying lightly, "I'm as good as 
the average." Let us rather make it our 
solemn aim to be, with divine help, a little 
better than the average man, to walk a 
little more erectly, to handle our finances 

[24] 



'^GOOD AS THE AVERAGE" 

a little more honorably and wisely, to acquire 
more useful information, and, without ever 
appearing self-righteous, to be exceptionally 
pure and true and helpful and magnanimous. 



[25] 



"THAT LITTLE STREAK OF 
RELIGION" 

A CHORUS girl who had encountered 
hard luck went to a minister for sym- 
pathy and help. Now the men and women 
of the stage do not, as a rule, when in trouble 
resort immediately to a clergyman. But this 
particular one was known far and wide for 
his great tenderness of heart and his sym- 
pathy with the weak, distressed, and tempted. 
He received the actress graciously, as he 
always received his callers. He showed such 
quick understanding of her situation and he 
appealed with such tact to her better nature 
that suddenly the girl said, "Well, I do be- 
lieve there is a little streak of religion in me 
after all, though it is buried way out of 
sight." It might have been years since she 
had given the subject any consideration, 
but now an exigency had arisen which made 
her aware that the deepest thing in her 
nature was the religious element. Not all 
her triumphs and not all her failures on the 
stage had extinguished within her this vital 
spark. 

[26] 



"THAT LITTLE STREAK" 

Yet hers was no abnormal experience. 
Religion is in the inheritance of most of 
us and in the training of many of us. Many 
a man in middle life will tell you that he 
was brought up to go to church or Sunday- 
school. Even if he has become utterly in- 
different, he cannot altogether shake off the 
influence of the prayer he used to offer at 
his mother's knee or of the Bible that had 
a place of honor in his early home or of his 
personal interest in religion in former times. 
Said such a man to a chance acquaintance 
the other day, "I used to be a professor, 
but I don't believe in God any more or in 
a hereafter. But there is one thing that 
troubles me. I have a little daughter and 
I can't teach her any more such nonsense as 
*Now I lay me down to sleep' — so what 
can I tell her.?" "Tell her," replied the 
other man, himself a bluff but sincere be- 
liever, "tell her to go to the devil, for she 
is likely to go that way with you believing 
as you do." Drastic counsel was this, but 
it is sometimes necessary to give a jolt to 
the man who is so cock-sure of his infidelity 
that he forgets his own past and forgets 
that which is best and deepest in his own 
nature. 

[271 



REAL RELIGION 



For religion is in our very blood. Talk 
about religion perishing from off the face 
of the earth! When men cease to appreciate 
the masterpieces of art, when noble music 
finds in them no response, when a lovely 
landscape fails to elicit their admiration, 
when they are not susceptible to the appeal 
of friendship, then and not till then will 
they give up their religion. And not even 
then, for the religious instinct is a deeper 
and more inalienable part of the human 
endowment than is the capacity to appreciate 
music or art or poetry or nature. Religion 
is in the blood of the Caucasian and the 
African, of the Christian and the Moham- 
medan, of the Jew and the Parsee. Indeed 
there is sometimes more genuine religion in 
a follower of a so-called heathen religion 
than in some nominal Christians. 

We are not talking now about forms and 
creeds, about denominations and isms. We 
are talking of that which underlies all expres- 
sion, and our appeal is not in the interests 
of any one religion as of religion pure and 
simple. It is not for me to dictate what 
form your religion shall take, but simply to 
suggest that "the little streak of religion'' 
in us needs to be brought under influences 

[28] 




"THAT LITTLE STREAK" 

that make for its strengthening and illumi- 
nation, and to be put to work in the field 
of our daily activities and relationships. 

Why should any of us wait until he has 
hard luck, until he is reduced to some desper- 
ate situation, before he discerns and confesses 
that he cannot rid himself, that he would 
not rid himself, of his religious instinct? 
Why not at once decide to give it more 
constant recognition and larger scope? 



[29l 



TO ONE SOURED ON LIFE 

"XT THAT can a man do who has become 
V V soured on life?" That question 
opens the door into a great subject, for 
despite the fact that Americans have the 
reputation of being the happiest and most 
buoyant people of the world, the number 
of those wholly or partly soured on life is 
larger than is at first supposed. They may 
not have gone so far as to contemplate 
throwing themselves into the nearest river, 
or taking a dose of strychnine. They are 
hardly ready to present themselves for 
treatment at any anti-suicide bureau; but 
the sweetness and charm of life have practi- 
cally vanished for them and they radiate 
gloom instead of sunshine as they go about 
the world. They have adopted a slower 
form of suicide. What word may be spoken 
to these individuals here and there that 
shall incite them to make one more desperate 
try for happiness ? 

It ought to be a word of sympathy first 
of all. Quite likely you have been unjustly 
treated. Some supposed friend has gone 

[30] 



TO ONE SOURED ON LIFE 

back on you. Circumstances over which 
you seem to have had no control have 
cramped your life. Your ^Muck," if you 
choose to call it that, has been harder than 
that of your neighbor. But does it all 
justify you in settling down to despair .^^ 
Our question is not what others can do 
for you, but what you can do, and my first 
appeal must be to your will-power. Maybe 
you need a kind of electric shock to summon 
up the forces of personal life that ought to 
assert themselves in a man, even though 
things have gone awry with him. 

Maybe, too, your ideas need some recon- 
struction. If your preconceived program 
of life has included naught but pleasurable 
experiences; if you have grown up thinking 
that you ought to be exempt from pain, 
disappointment, reverses, shabby treatment 
by others — then it is high time that you 
got a larger view of the universe; a higher 
ideal of existence than that of sitting in 
easy chairs and sipping nectar from golden 
cups. Not to have any hard knocks means 
flabby, not virile, manhood. You hardly 
know what life in its totality is until you 
have had some encounter with sorrow, loss, 
or disappointment. But your sense of re- 

[31] 



REAL RELIGION 



action from these things is evidence that 
life is meant to be joyous in spite of trial. 
Now go one step further and believe that 
life is meant to be more joyous for you because 
of your afflictions, and set yourself resolutely 
to discovering the good at the heart of the 
evil. 

Try the nature cure. Go out these fine 
spring days and watch the clouds floating 
over the sky. Bare your head to the breezes 
sweet with the suggestion of flowers. Take 
delight in the bewitching greenery with 
which shrubs and trees and meadows are 
adorning themselves. A bright spring morn- 
ing is a splendid antidote for the sour spirit. 

Try service. Somebody is worse off than 
you. Find him out and seek to alleviate 
his lot. YeSj you can do it even if you 
aren't a city missionary or a social settle- 
ment worker, or even if you think you have 
no knack for cheering others up. Try and 
you will be surprised how that faculty of 
bearing other people's burdens, when once 
put at work, strengthens. 

Try faith. But you haven't any, you say. 
Oh, yes, there is a good big residuum of 
faith even in your skeptical mind and your 
downcast heart. Cling to it. Nourish it 

[32] 



TO ONE SOURED ON LIFE 

by putting it in contact with others who are 
trying to walk by faith. Believe with all 
your might what you do believe and your 
faith will grow. 

It ought to be good-bye from this day 
forward to the sour spirit, for the gift of 
existence is too precious a one to fritter 
away or despise under any circumstances. 
I know a man who remarks to his friends 
as he comes in to dinner every night, often 
after a hard and trying day, "The world's 
a great go, isn't it?" Yes, he is right, even 
this world with all its aches and pains is 
a "great go," and if you will say over to 
yourself every morning on arising the little 
verse that follows, I am ready to guarantee 
that you will cease to be soured on life: 

**How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy! " 



[33] 



THE FUN OF BEGINNING AGAIN 

SOON after the San Francisco earth- 
quake, a distinguished physician of 
that city, having journeyed to another part 
of the land, was telling a group of friends 
about the disaster. He dwelt chiefly upon 
what had befallen others, and it was only 
incidentally that his hearers learned that 
he had himself lost his splendid medical 
library and many cases of valuable surgical 
instruments, while his professional practise 
had been reduced to an almost non-paying 
basis. When the members of the group 
began to commiserate him on his personal 
losses, he cheerfully remarked, ''Oh, never 
mind about them! I shall have the fun of 
beginning again." 

Such tests as these come to some men 
like a stroke out of the clear sky. The 
artist completes a picture over which he 
has toiled long, and lo! some miscreant or 
some careless person daubs it in a way that 
forever destroys its beauty. The successful 
business man is betrayed by some trusted 
associate, and lo! the earnings of years 

[34] 



FUN OF BEGINNING AGAIN 

are suddenly dissipated. Now, under 
such circumstances, how do men behave? 
How many of them see the fun of 
beginning again? Most of us can point 
to personal acquaintances, who may have 
failed disastrously in business, but who 
refused to be downed. Today they have 
recovered, or even exceeded their former 
prosperity. Adversity acted as a splendid 
spur. They felt the joyous tingle of start- 
ing in afresh, and proving that they could 
succeed even after the world had passed 
the superficial verdict that they had failed. 

But aside from special tragic disasters, 
is it not true that every one engaged in busi- 
ness or professional life must in the ordinary 
courses of that life learn to appreciate the 
fun of beginning again? Otherwise they 
get into ruts, and as some one has wittily 
said, "There is a difference of only one 
letter between ^groove' and ^ grave.'" It 
certainly behooves all of us frequently to 
prod ourselves, even when we think we are 
going ahead fairly well, with the question, 
"Am I doing my best? If I were starting 
in anew today on my career, would I not 
display more inventiveness, perseverance, 
enthusiasm than I am exhibiting now?" 

[35] 



REAL RELIGION 



This is the way in which men get to the top 
of the ladder. With the apostle Paul, 
they say to themselves every morning, "Not 
as though I had already attained." 

Not less necessary is it in the field of 
daily human relationships to be alive to 
the fun of beginning again. The friction, 
the misunderstandings, the collisions that 
mar many a home, would be obviated if 
the members of the family circle conceived 
of their contact day by day as a chance to 
better the attitude and behavior of yester- 
day. Even kind and wise parents may grow 
in kindness and in wisdom. Of course, if 
one thinks he knows it all, there is no hope 
for such a conceited parent; but if he is 
eager to discharge his parental duties in 
a way that will forever put the stamp of 
an earnest personality upon plastic children, 
then he will say to himself every morning, 
"Fatherhood is a blessed responsibility. I 
don't feel as if I had mastered the fine art. 
I am going to see today if I can't begin all 
over again." By night-time the children 
will notice the difference and be saying to 
one another, "What has got into father.'^" 

Would that children, too, might sometime 
start on a new tack with reference to their 

[36] 



FUN OF BEGINNING AGAIN 

parents. It is not viciousness but thought- 
lessness that makes them forgetful of the 
delicate courtesies which make any home 
an Eden. Maybe these lines will fall under 
the eye of some son away from home, or 
some daughter, who ought, before sleeping 
tonight, to make glad the heart of a distant 
parent by a loving filial letter. So, around 
the entire circle of relationships, how much 
better we all should do if we were suffi- 
ciently conscious of our past failures and 
sufficiently aware of our potentialities to be 
willing to say to ourselves, ''I am going to 
begin all over again and see if I can't live 
with this or that person more happily and 
effectively." 

And there is one even higher relationship 
in reference to which we ought to find the 
joy of beginning anew. We have made a 
poor fist of religion, many of us. Perhaps 
we have acquired just enough to make us 
miserable, but never mind; we can begin 
over again tomorrow, today. And even if 
we have failed once, twice, or thrice, we can 
make a success of it for all time to come. 
We can if we only think we can. 



[37] 



THE CONTAGION OF GOOD CHEER 

CAN a person be cheerful even if he is 
not happy?" asked a bright young 
woman the other day. "And ought he to 
feign cheerfulness when he is at heart un- 
happy?" Now this particular young woman 
is one of the most constantly cheerful per- 
sons I ever knew. It seems as if it were as 
easy and natural for her to be sunny faced 
from morn till eve as for a good many of 
the rest of us to be glum. And yet she 
leads a rather monotonous life, most of 
her time and strength being given to the 
care of two lively and sometimes exacting 
little children. But her question made me 
think for the first time that what those 
about her have always considered a rare 
natural gift may be not a matter of tem- 
perament only, but of patient cultivation 
also. We see only the beautiful product. 
She alone and God know the self-discipline 
and the struggle. And though there may 
be times when she has to feign happiness, I 
really think that she has come into the pos- 
session of more than the ordinary person's 
share of the genuine article. 

[38] 



GOOD CHEER 



And so I would say, "If you can't be 
happy, seem to be happy, and the chances 
are that you will soon be really happy." At 
least we can imitate the man who early in 
life established the rule that he would force 
himself to be happy until ten o'clock in the 
morning. If he succeeded up to that point, 
the problem took care of itself usually for 
the rest of the day. There was once a man 
of whom the dwellers in the same house 
said that he always came down to breakfast 
looking as if he had just inherited a fortune. 

One reason why children are so charming 
is that they are happy, as a rule. A merry 
child in a household radiates good cheer. An 
English poet speaks of a glad and winsome 
child as 

"A silver stream 
Breaking with laughter from the lake divine 
Whence all things flow." 

Why should a man or woman outgrow this 
mood of good cheer .^ The crucial question 
is, What kind of a front will we show to the 
world.'* Ought it not to be, for our own 
sakes, an attitude of hope and cheer .^^ It is 
good for a man every now and then to 
shake himself free from the things that de- 
press and annoy him and say resolutely, 

[39] 



REAL RELIGION 



^^ Uncertain as is the way before me, un- 
pleasant as are my surroundings, difficult 
as is my problem, I refuse to let the diffi- 
culties and irritations sour my spirit, spoil 
all my good times, blind me to the glories 
of earth and sea and sky, deaden me to the 
simple delights of every day, the music of 
children's laughter, the solace of great books, 
the blessings of friendship, the splendid 
achievements of the men and women who 
are helping the world, or finally and chiefly 
to the eternal goodness of God the Father 
Almighty." 

Such an attitude is of incalculable value 
to the man himself. Think, too, what it 
means to others. I worked once in an office 
with a young man of moderate abilities, but 
who was the incarnation of sunshine. The 
more brilliant men there were respected, 
but he was loved by all from manager to 
office boy, and when he left to take another 
position there was a general feeling of loss 
and of gloom. Coming out of a restaurant 
last week my companion called my atten- 
tion to the young man who helps people 
find seats and remarked, ^' He'll be President 
someday." "Why?" I asked. "Because he 
is always so pleasant," was the reply. 

[40] 



GOOD CHEER 



I came across this new beatitude recently 
with which I close, "Blessed are the cheer 
makers, for they shall be called sons of the 
morning." 



Uil 



THE LARGE IN THE LITTLE 

"TTE had gained a capacity for getting 
JTx great and far-reaching happiness 
from the exquisite little joys of life." Thus 
the hero of a short story in one of our current 
magazines is characterized by the author, 
and what a splendid thing it is to be able to 
say that either of a man in a story or a man 
in real life. When you have reached the 
point where you do not need a rare piece 
of good fortune or a trip to Europe or a 
unique relationship to the great and mighty 
of the earth to make you happy you have 
mastered the secret of contented and fruit- 
ful living. When the play of the sunshine 
across your desk, the laughter of a little 
child, the cheery greeting of a friend who 
meets and passes you in the crowd, a page 
out of a new book, or any one of the com- 
paratively trifling experiences which befall 
you between sunrise and sunset can make 
you deeply and unfeignedly happy you can 
bid defiance to all the black bats of fear 
and trouble which hover about your daily 
pathway. 

[42] 



LARGE IN THE LITTLE 

The little things that together comprise 
the life of a single day ought to yield us joy. 
In the same story from which I have quoted 
the author refers to the great happiness 
which comes ''from the blessed continuance 
of the unnoticed daily good." Whenever 
the routine looks bare and tedious to us 
let us think how we should feel if something 
interposed to bring it to a sharp conclusion. 
If some illness or disability prevents one 
from going to his daily task, how he yearns 
for a return to the former routine. Pray, 
is it nothing to you that you arose this 
morning in health, that you can take up 
your duties in the full possession of your 
reason, that you have some honest, profit- 
able work to do in God's great working 
world .^ The other day a well-known Ameri- 
can authoress was burned out. But instead 
of crying over the catastrophe she wrote 
as follows: ''I lost nearly everything — 
priceless books, all my note-books of years 
of work. Well, to be alive and well is good." 

One can harvest, too, a crop of joys 
by being responsive to the beauty and order 
of the universe in which we live. An ele- 
vator boy said the other day, "I ought 
to be thankful that as my car moves from 

[43] 



REAL RELIGION 



floor to floor I can get such frequent glimpses 
of the sunshine and the sky." How fooHsh 
we are to fail to notice the loveliness of 
tiny things in nature, the blending of colors 
in the violet, the glory of a single star, the 
thrilling song which the little bird pours 
forth. You can connect with many of these 
sources of joy without hardly stirring from 
your tracks, only there must be the ear 
to listen, the eye to see, the mind to appre- 
ciate, but if you are absorbed in the fluctua- 
tions of the stock market or the perplexities 
of housekeeping you are likely to pass them 
all by as too small for consideration. 

The loves of our life may make us pro- 
foundly happy and true love expresses itself 
in a hundred little ways. What you really 
love about your little boy is not merely the 
man that you see he is going to be by and 
by, but the fact that he toddles toward the 
door the moment he hears your key in the 
lock and gives an exultant [shout when he 
feels your arms about him. The man who 
postpones the pleasure that he is to get 
out of his kinship and friendship to the 
time when he can sit down and take in fully 
and scientifically the dimensions of that 
love makes a vital mistake. Learn to enjoy 

[44] 



4 



LARGE IN THE LITTLE 

your children, your home, and your friends 
as you go along. 

And it is marvelous, too, how the little 
services for others react and pour a flood 
of joy into your life. That is the delight 
of doing something for the child — a penny 
present often counts for as much in his 
eyes as a ten thousand dollar check. And 
people generally are helped more than you 
realize by a small offering on your part 
provided your heart goes with it. And 
the moment that we realize how we have 
served another's need, another fountain of 
happiness is opened in our own hearts. 

God put us in this world to be happy. 
Philosophers have fought over the propo- 
sition whether virtue or happiness is the 
main end of living, but no system of ethics 
leaves us any right to be gloomy, and even 
that stiif old theological document known 
as the Westminster Catechism afiirms that 
one of the chief ends of men is to enjoy God 
forever. But if we are going to enjoy God 
and heaven by and by we must establish 
at once here a habit of forcing little things 
to yield us their proper meed of delight. 



[45] 



RUNNING BY THE SIGNALS 

NO railroad accidents are more lamen- 
table or inexcusable than those arising 
from neglect of signals. For as our systems 
are organized today each trainman is sup- 
posed to know what each green light and 
each red light and every other warning 
device means, and upon his prompt and 
thorough obedience depend the lives and 
property of those who have entrusted them- 
selves to the railway companies for safe 
transportation. And when a man, either 
through carelessness or wilfulness, disregards 
a signal he nullifies the proper working out 
of a carefully planned schedule and often 
brings terrible consequences upon himself, 
and others. 

We are all quick to condemn the recreant 
engineer or switchman, but when it comes 
to the sphere of our own lives we daily run 
by the signals with hardly a thought of 
what we are doing. The course of life 
resembles a railroad track. We start at 
a given point and are headed toward the 
terminus at the other end of the line, but 

[46] 



RUNNING BY SIGNALS 

as we rush along how numerous are the 
chances for derailment and disaster! Yet 
as we speed forward, there are placed along 
the track at certain intervals warning and 
admonishing signals. We are told when 
to slow up and when to quicken our pace 
and when to halt altogether. There is one 
class of signals for children and another for 
young men and young women and another 
for persons in middle life and still another 
for the aged, but no period of life is without 
its signals. 

The warnings that relate to our physical 
well-being are many and constant. The 
baby toddles up to the stove, puts its fingers 
on the hot cover, and cries out with pain. 
And that experience serves as a signal to 
remind the child perhaps for all time that 
stoves with fires in them are always hot and 
are always to be let alone. Through the 
limbs and bodies of older people dart now 
and then significant pains or they find 
themselves sleepless at night or craving 
strong stimulants or are irritable and fretful. 
Signals they are which nature, overdriven 
or neglected, hangs out to tell us that we 
are doing violence to our bodies, which 
are something more than so much muscle, 

[47] 



REAL RELIGION 



bone, and tissue. They are veritable temples 
of the Holy Spirit. The signals mean that 
it is time to slow up, to reconstruct our 
methods, to consider whether we are doing 
the fair thing by ourselves in point of diet, 
exercise, and rest. 

As we mingle with our fellow men we get 
a variety of helpful signals that if heeded 
may lead us to a stricter watch upon habits 
and actions. An unexpectedly large bill 
comes in. Your feeling of irritation is per- 
haps the token that you are living beyond 
your means or are too socially ambitious. 
Somebody jokes you about your fondness 
for somebody else's wife. It's only a joke 
made in good temper, and yet it sets you 
thinking and you become more circumspect. 

What signals does a man get from time 
to time touching the state and prospects 
of his soul.^ Some Sunday morning your 
little child comes to you and says, "Papa, 
why don't you ever go to church with us.'^" 
The blunt question rather startles you, and 
instead of answering her directly you repeat 
the question silently to yourself. Or maybe 
you are a churchgoer, but the sermons and 
the hallowed associations fail to touch and 
inspire you as they used to do. It is pos- 

[48] 



1 



RUNNING BY SIGNALS 

sible that the minister is becoming dull, but 
it is more likely that your mind is so crusted 
over with schemes for getting rich that the 
arrow from the preacher's quiver cannot 
pierce to the spot where you really live. 
Nothing is more pathetic in human life 
than the increasing insensibility of many 
men absorbed in business and pleasure to 
the appeal of higher interests, their unsus- 
ceptibility to the higher forms of literature, 
music, and art, their indifference to Jesus 
Christ. 

But in the gracious ordering of life there 
are signals all along the way. And they 
mean that One is trying to communicate 
with us who has more knowledge than we 
and who wants to help us avoid pitfalls 
and snares. He knows the track ahead of 
us as we cannot know it, and he would save 
us from plunging headlong to wreck and 
ruin. 



[49] 



THE BURIED LIFE 

But often in the world's most crowded streets, 
But often in the din of strife, 
There rises an unspeakable desire 
After the knowledge of our buried life. 

THUS Matthew Arnold depicts the 
yearning which now and then comes 
to a man for an earlier mood, a former 
attitude, a lost experience vanished, but 
not forgotten — for the moment out of 
reach, but not altogether irrecoverable. 

What have you done with the best part 
of you, my friend? Perhaps you do not 
realize the fact, but you have practically 
dug a grave and deposited therein the thing 
that was finest and purest in you. Upon 
it, as the years have come and gone, you have 
spread layer after layer of interest in lesser 
matters, and now that former self is stifling 
for breath. 

There was a time when the sweet and 
simple satisfaction of the home meant a 
good deal to you; when you would shorten 
your luncheon-hour in order that you might 
get home in season to toss the baby in your 

[50] 



THE BURIED LIFE 

arms, or to have a romp with the children, 
or to spend the first half-hour after supper 
in reading some profitable book with your 
wife. But as the cares of this world have 
thickened, and the deceitfulness of riches 
and the struggle for them have grown upon 
you, the home-seeking and home-making 
instinct has become dulled in you. You 
aim still to furnish the means of support 
for the family and to make them as ample 
as possible, but your children miss the direct 
touch of your personality upon them, your 
wife longs for the old, happy, close com- 
radeship, and children and wife both are 
beginning to show to others the lack of just 
such an influence as the father and husband 
alone can bring. 

Do you remember the time when the 
sound of "My Country 'Tis of Thee," or 
"The Star Spangled Banner," played by 
a marching band thrilled you to the finger- 
tips.^ Citizenship meant a great deal to 
you in those days. You did not care simply 
to play the game of politics and to get 
your share of the offices, but you did work 
hard to get the right men into office, to keep 
the standard of public service high, to 
serve the nation, the state, the community 

[SI] 



REAL RELIGION 



in ways accessible to you, because you 
believed that patriotism means not simply 
going to war in behalf of native land, but 
in times of peace, vigilance and attention 
to the prosaic details that make for the 
welfare of the people, that keep the water 
system pure, the schools and libraries up 
to par, the moral atmosphere free from 
harmful elements. But somehow you have 
today lost all interest in practical or theo- 
retical politics. Caucus night finds you at 
home instead of at the booth. You take a 
rather pessimistic view of politics in general. 
It is too ''nasty" for you to soil your hands 
with. 

Religion once had a charm for you. It 
seemed to offer an explanation of the mys- 
teries of this life; it furnished inspiration 
for manly living day by day. You felt the 
contagion of noble lives lived under the 
influence of religion and rejoiced to feel 
yourself part of that noble company who 

"Through life's long days of strife 
Still chant their morning song," 

but the zest and power of religion have some- 
how disappeared. Not merely that you 
have ceased going to church regularly, 
or if you go you do so perfunctorily, but 
[5Z] 



THE BURIED LIFE 

you are aware that the fires of a sensitive, 
religious experience no longer glow. 

Too bad, indeed, is it that these varied 
types of buried life exist all about us. 
Those rare, beautiful growths of other years 
needed to be tended and not to be choked, 
and it is not their fault that they have been 
merely suffocated by "other things entering 
in" and choking them. But it is not too 
late to resurrect them. The spring is here 
again. A great many things that we 
thought were dead are now awakening to 
new life. You can never be sure that what 
you thought had gone forever is beyond 
reviving. Give that which was best and 
still is best in you a fresh chance. Remove 
the layers of worldliness, selfishness, pride, 
ambition that weigh down upon the buried 
life. Give it light and air and a fair chance 
and see how wondrously beautiful and strong 
it yet can become. 



[S3l 



THE DRUMMER'S SUNDAY 

MY professional duties involve the 
spending of a Sunday occasionally 
in a hotel in some unfamiliar city or 
town. Invariably I find myself in the com- 
panionship of a number of traveling men. 
Agreeable, straightforward gentlemen these 
"drummers" are, and many an interesting 
and profitable talk I have had with them 
at table or in the lobby. These knights of 
the gripsack carry keen eyes. They know 
this country well and human nature still 
better, and they have a racy way of setting 
forth their observations and opinions. 

I watch with special interest to see how 
they observe Sunday. Very few of them 
fail to differentiate it from week-days. Some 
of them keep it as strictly as I do myself. 
But in the case of the majority perhaps this 
is about the program: a late rising and a 
sauntering into the dining-room for break- 
fast about as late as the law permits, then 
the Sunday papers with a cigar and a chat 
consume most of the hours until dinner. 
And when that substantial meal is over 
another cigar, some more conversation, quite 

[54] 



THE DRUMMER'S SUNDAY 

likely a nap or a walk or both, and before 
the day ends, a budget of letters, almost 
invariably one to ''the house" reporting 
last week's business, while in all probability 
the route for the coming days has to be 
sketched out and notifications sent on 
ahead. So the day slips by with a mixture 
of rest and business and pleasure and off 
they go Sunday night or Monday morning 
to "green fields and pastures new," which 
means in plain prose to warehouses, shops 
and factories, and the everlasting effort to 
sell, sell, sell. 

My first feeling with regard to these enter- 
prising fellows is one of pity for their enforced 
and often prolonged absence from home. 
Some of them get used to it and some of 
them do not, and the latter, I think, are 
less to be pitied than the former. Once 
in a while I see a drummer detach himself 
from a group of fellow travelers and make 
for the long-distance telephone booth. In 
due time he emerges with a fond and happy 
look in his eyes, for he has been saying good 
night to the youngsters perhaps two hundred 
miles away and has been listening to the 
voice of the woman whom he most loves to 
hear speak. 

[55] 



REAL RELIGION 



Blessed be the long-distance telephone! 
It has saved many a homesick man from 
utter despair, but it is rather expensive, and 
in lieu of that a good fat letter started home- 
ward on Sunday will not only bless its recip- 
ients, but react helpfully on the writer. No 
drummer ought to omit this. And he ought 
to try to make it as breezy and hopeful as 
possible, for hard as it is to be away from his 
dearest ones, it is no less hard for the "little 
woman" who stays by the stuff and perhaps 
for the " kiddies '' too. 

And how about getting out the Bible 
from the gripsack? Only the other Saturday 
night I was delighted to hear a group of 
traveling men in a hotel corridor talking, 
not politics or football, but telling each other 
what they thought about the Bible. Several 
were brave enough to declare their belief 
that it contained a vast amount of sound 
sense. "What a wonderful leader and states- 
man Moses was,'' remarked one in the group. 
"Yes," chimed in another. "And that 
man Solomon knew what he was talking 
about when he wrote the Proverbs." He 
who thinks the Bible an uninteresting and 
outworn book is profoundly ignorant, and 
if you want something that will make your 

[56] 



THE DRUMMER'S SUNDAY 

Sundays brighter and better just get out your 
old Bible and start in almost anywhere. 

Church? Well, we don't know about 
that. But some traveling men do go and 
they wouldn't give up the habit for anything. 
They will even sacrifice an hour or two in bed 
for it. Enterprising churches post notices 
in hotel lobbies or send personal invitations 
to traveling men, but even if the churches 
are sleepy you can get good from public 
worship and the chances are that if you 
will go half-way you will find a cordial 
welcome. A friend of mine, a drummer, 
was sitting one Sunday afternoon in a western 
hotel and suddenly he burst out with this 
remark, "Boys, let's all go to church to- 
night." The word was passed around and 
by seven o'clock twenty-five men filed out 
of the front door and made their way to 
the nearest church. What a sensation they 
created as they were ushered to the best 
seats on the broad aisle! When the con- 
tribution-box came around each man, by 
previous agreement, put in a dollar bill. 
They haven't even now stopped talking in 
that church about those drummers and their 
wonderful and inspiriting visit. 

[57] 



FIXED IDEAS 

WE are hearing frequently today of 
*' fixed ideas." The term usually 
has an unpleasant savor. It stands for 
certain unfortunate notions that take posses- 
sion of men's minds and hold them captive. 
Doctors and ministers are constantly thrown 
in contact with people thus unhappily 
obsessed. A clergyman told me the other 
day that a man had been to him to try and 
get relief from the thought that the spirit 
of a certain dead drunkard had gotten hold 
of him. Other nervous sufferers brood over 
this or that real or fancied trouble. This 
man, who now has money in the bank, is 
sure that he is going to die in the poorhouse. 
That woman thinks her husband has stopped 
loving her. That man grieves over a sin 
committed twenty years ago. 

The usual method of treating these victims 
of painful fixed ideas is to try and inject into 
the mind a counter-irritant in the form of 
some cheerful, hope-laden thought, trusting 
that it will in time drive out the evil spirits. 
May it not be a good plan for all of us before 

[58] 



FIXED IDEAS 



we become neurasthenics and while we are 
in a normal physical and mental condition 
to establish in our minds certain ideas of 
such positive strength and worth that they 
will preempt every nook and cranny and 
make it impossible for malign and distress- 
ing thoughts to find entrance, much less 
lodgment? 

Now we do not have to manufacture such 
ideas or to search far and wide for them. 
We need not start an independent intellec- 
tual factory and store it with notions purely 
of our own production, that will not bear the 
test of the world's scrutiny. We have but 
to recognize and accept what has approved 
itself to the judgment of the centuries, what 
at the bar of reason today stands forth as 
the truest and finest thought that the hu- 
man mind can cherish. Some glorious ideas 
may be said to be fixed in the thinking of 
mankind; not that every individual holds 
them tenaciously, but that they are widely 
and increasingly current and that they are 
held most strongly by the prophets, the 
poets, and the moral leaders of the race. 

The intrinsic worth of goodness is a fixed 
idea. Men almost universally recognize the 
sharp line between good and evil. They be- 

[59I 



REAL RELLGION 



lieve that the clean, straight life is vastly to 
be preferred to its opposite. They have come 
to agree with the great English preacher, 
Frederick W. Robertson, when he says: 
^^Were there no God and no future life, 
even then, it would be better to be true 
than to be false, to be pure than to be 
impure, to be generous than to be selfish." 
Wild horses cannot drag from the mind of 
man the idea that goodness is the great, the 
supreme test of human life. 

The idea of immortality has also fixed 
itself in the thinking of mankind. We 
revolt from the materialism that regards 
death as extinction of personality. When- 
ever we lay our dead away, it is with the 
confident hope that they have not been 
resolved into nothingness. When we look 
forward to our own certain end we believe 
that it will be but the beginning of an 
ampler existence. Prove it we cannot. It 
is enough to feel that ''we are mightier 
than we know.'' 

Another fixed idea is the idea of God. 
It is vastly harder to believe in no God at 
all than to believe in some kind of a God. 
Without him the universe is unintelligible, 
and human life a mystery and a mockery. 

[60] 



FIXED IDEAS 



You may burn men at the stake, you may 
strip them of all their possessions, but you 
cannot keep them from believing in God. 

The preeminence of Jesus Christ is still 
another fixed idea. - However theories of 
his person may differ, the modern world is 
practically at one in its appreciation of the 
character of Jesus and of the bearing of his 
teachings and example on all our modern 
problems. Science and invention register 
great advances from year to year, but Jesus 
retains his mastership of the race. 

Such are a few of the ideas that cling to 
countless human minds the world over. 
Why not fix them firmly in our own thinking 
and act upon them.^ 



[6i] 



"AFTER YOU, PLEASE'* 

IT sometimes requires the services of an 
expert to determine whether a piece 
of furniture is genuine mahogany or ordi- 
nary wood overlaid with a handsome veneer. 
Neither is it always easy, from casual ac- 
quaintance, to decide whether politeness in 
a certain individual is real or superficial. 
But time will tell. I knew two men in col- 
lege, one of whom was the most popular 
fellow in his class, and the other one of the 
most unpopular, but both were exceedingly 
deferential and considerate in the presence 
of others. In the one case, however, the 
politeness was the natural outflowing of a 
refined and unselfish character as spon- 
taneous and beautiful as the blush upon the 
peach, while in the other case the politeness 
appeared to be simply a means toward the 
accomplishment of a selfish end, a species 
of toadyism by virtue of which he hoped to 
get the entree into certain circles. But in 
the long run he lost the favor which he 
courted, as a man always does who tries to 
ride into popularity on his gentlemanly 
manners alone. 

[621 



"AFTER YOU, PLEASE'' 

We on this side the water, with our demo- 
cratic traditions, are inclined to look upon 
customs in other countries as mere empty 
formalism. Passing out of a Paris restaurant 
one day I noticed how my companion, a 
Parisian, lifted his hat to the lady cashier. 
"I do it," he explained, "not because she 
is a lady, but because I am a gentleman." 
I couldn't help wondering whether it would 
not be better to be a trifle less polite and 
a little more truly regardful of the feminine 
sex. And as between the suave manner 
with a flinty heart and the brusque manner 
with the kind heart, give me every time the 
latter. 

But need a man be brusque in order to 
be genuine.^ By no means. Let us get 
back to the tap-root of politeness, which 
is a good heart. Starting with that, let a 
man cultivate the amenities and civilities. 
Few of us are as considerate as we ought 
to be of the rights and claims of others. 
In how many homes is politeness at a mini- 
mum! When company comes you brush 
up your manners for a day or two, but 
when the company departs you forget all 
about "Thank you" and "If you please." 
You keep the easy chair in the parlor when 

[63] 



REAL RELIGION 



your mother or sister comes in. You dare 
not be anything else but civil to a compara- 
tive stranger, but you are hardly decent 
to your dearest ones. So, too, in business 
circles. Some proprietors enter their stores 
or their offices without so much as a pleas- 
ant ''good morning" to office boy or sten- 
ographer. 

"After you, please" — what a world of 
hidden meaning there Is in this little phrase 
which we take so lightly upon our lips. 
It means, when we think it through, that 
we have made the great renunciation, that 
we have really chosen to give others prece- 
dence, that we are willing to follow and 
not to set the pace, that we are content to 
be second or third or even fourth. Are we 
ready to undergo such a personal shrinkage.'^ 
Of one who came nineteen hundred years 
ago, not to be ministered unto but to minister. 
It was said in later time, ''Jesus Christ was 
the only perfect gentleman that ever lived." 



[64] 



^'SHE COULD, SHE WOULD, SHE 
DID" 

I NEVER happened to meet the woman on 
whose tombstone was carved this epi- 
taph, but I have met her counterpart many 
times. And it may profit us all to pause a 
moment and reflect upon the meaning of 
such a summing up of a life career. How 
simple such a characterization is, how un- 
conventional, how different from the ones 
which appear with almost wearisome mo- 
notony in every churchyard. And yet how 
adequate it is, too, how inclusive and beau- 
tiful. To be able to utter these six words 
about any man or woman whose life race 
is run is as much of a compliment as a 
large volume of glowing praise. Capacity, 
willingness, action; when those three traits 
are properly blended you cannot fail to get 
a strong, fruitful "character. And almost all 
the tragedies in human life, almost all the 
mistakes and blunders are due to the ab- 
sence of one or more of these qualities or to 
their being faultily related to one another. 
" She could." There was capacity, to begin 

[65] 



REAL RELIGION 



with. It may be that she possessed wealth 
or uncommon mental gifts. More likely she 
had a fund of hope and faith and love. At 
any rate she had innate ability; but was 
she any exception to the rest of us.'^ Every 
mother's son of us possesses some ability, 
and if we are going to do anything with 
our lives we must discern what it is, take 
its dimensions, realize its value. Self-dis- 
trust is as much of an impediment to prog- 
ress as self-conceit. ^'Oh, I can't." How 
often that depressing phrase is on the lips 
of people who really know better. Every- 
body can do something and be something. 
There is a vast deal of unused good material 
buried in many a man's nature simply be- 
cause he has not courage to mine for it and 
bring it out into the open. Hundreds of 
persons may be able to do any number of 
things better than you can, but there is at 
least one thing and perhaps more that you 
can do as well as any one else and probably 
better than a good many others. 

"She would." Capacity was yoked with 
willingness in this woman's case. "I will 
try" represented her attitude through life. 
When people came to her to gain her help 
in some worthy undertaking, they did not 
[66] 



"SHE COULD, WOULD, DID" 

have to break down a great wall of reluc- 
tance. She was ready to take the responsible 
post assigned her, to give of her substance, her 
time, her ingenuity, for the welfare of others. 
How many desirable reforms would be 
accomplished, how much faster the chariot 
of progress would advance, how many 
struggling little enterprises would gain a 
solid underpinning, if the people who could 
help them were only willing to do their part. 
Oh, cultivate the willing, compliant, and not 
the demurring, objecting disposition. 

"She did." Ah, there is the fruitage of it 
all. The world wants people who do things. 
Many capable and willing individuals stop just 
short of performance. They possess ability, 
they are full of kindly intentions, but some- 
how the letter of sympathy never gets 
written, the call upon some forlorn person 
never gets made, the means of personal 
culture close at hand is never actually laid 
hold of. So golden days pass away with 
nothing tangible accomplished. So long ago 
as the first century there lived a woman by 
the name of Dorcas, who we have reason 
to believe was not brilliant intellectually 
or conspicuous socially, but her fame has 
lived through the centuries, because, as 

[67] 



REAL RELIGION 



the account of her life says, she was "full 
of good works and almsdeeds which she 
did." She was handy with her needle 
and her friends and neighbors profited con- 
stantly by the garments which she made 
and distributed generously to those who had 
need of them. Many of us are full of good 
works which we never do, which we intend 
to do tomorrow or next week, but this 
Dorcas of the first century clung to her 
intentions till they became realized facts, 
and therefore she is fitly characterized as 
"full of good works which she did." There 
is a little touch of irony in those last three 
words which ought to make us twinge, 
when our actual performance comes far 
short of what we have purposed. 

A good ideal for a man's life is this: 
To measure your capacity for eflScient work, 
to cultivate a willing spirit, and then to go 
ahead and do something. Is not that the 
secret of a happy, earnest life, not overbusy, 
but serene, steady, and fruitful.'^ 



[68] 



"BE SOMEBODY" 

THIS laconic injunction caught my eye 
the other day. It was the first head- 
line of a bold-faced advertisement proclaim- 
ing the advantages of a certain school of 
correspondence. It offered attractive courses 
in engineering, architecture, electricity, and 
a number of other branches of learning, and 
the inducement held forth was that it does 
not pay to settle down lazily in a minor 
position when by gaining more information 
one's services would command a higher 
salary. I can imagine that such an adver- 
tisement would appeal powerfully to many 
young men. It suggests a diiferentiation of 
oneself from the common herd, a striking 
out boldly with the hope and expectation of 
amounting to something. The nobodies are 
all about us. Some of them are amiable, 
well-meaning persons. But they lack ginger 
and go. Negative, colorless they are when 
the world wants men of conviction, men of 
action. 

Not so were the men who have really 
contributed something to humanity. "Be 

[69] 



REAL RELIGION 



somebody" whispered a voice in the ears 
of Tyndale early in the sixteenth century, 
and he set his teeth and said, "If God spares 
my life I will make it possible for any plow- 
boy in England to read the Bible in his 
own tongue." "Be somebody" was the 
bugle-call a century ago to Samuel J. Mills, 
the American pioneer of the modern mission- 
ary movement, and he wrote in his diary, 
"No young man ought to think of living 
without trying to make his influence felt 
around the globe." "Be somebody" said 
the inward monitor to Frances Willard, and 
out of her brain and heart came the splen- 
did development of the Women's Christian 
Temperance Union. "Be somebody" was 
the terse command that spurred William 
Booth on to organize the Salvation Army. 

And thus, time after time, to the country 
lad hoeing his father's corn, to the city 
clerk not content with being a mere drudge, 
to the society maiden weary of her gayeties, 
to the middle-aged man conscious that 
there is yet another chance before the night 
closes in upon him, has come this incisive 
voice bidding the one addressed cease being 
"anybody" or "nobody" and rise to the 
dignity of "somebody." 

[70] 



"BE SOMEBODY" 



It is a noble command. We are meant 
to be somebodies, to count for all we are 
worth, to play the game through fairly 
and vigorously and never be quitters or 
shirks. The manager of a great corporation 
said recently that he sought for men to 
become agents of his company who could 
impress their individuality upon those with 
whom the concern did business so that they 
would not think of it as an abstract entity, 
but would personify it in the faces and figures 
of its cheery, whole-souled drummers. To- 
day, as of yore when conditions were far 
simpler, people like to do business, not with 
a tremendous affair known as the Amalga- 
mated Hair Pin Company Limited, but with 
Jones and Smith and Brown. 

If we cannot be somebody in the eyes 
of the big world we can be within a limited 
area. We can be somebody to our children, 
our friends, our neighbors, our church asso- 
ciates. The secret is first to build ourselves 
up in the finest graces and virtues and then 
to expend them lavishly on others. 



[71] 



"HOW IS BUSINESS?" 

HOW is business? This is the great 
. American question. Watch two men 
accost each other. "How are you?" "How 
is your family?" "Do you think it is 
going to rain?" These are likely to be 
the first questions, but usually they are in 
the nature of a polite introduction to the 
one theme in which both are most interested. 
All over the land this question is being asked 
all day long. No solicitude for any states- 
man or celebrated author who may be ill 
is quite so keen as the popular desire that 
this great intangible, semi-personal con- 
cern of mankind known as business shall 
suffer no fluctuations of health. Wars are 
looked upon as a menace to commerce, 
and therefore organizations of business men 
express themselves in favor of universal 
peace. Political campaigns are dreaded lest 
they should lower the barometer of trade. 
Prolonged and bitter strikes are disap- 
proved of, not, perhaps, primarily because 
of the sufferings they entail upon those 
most concerned, but because sooner or later 
they may affect general business. 

[72] 



^^ H W IS BUSINESS?" 

It is no sign that a man is entirely com- 
mercialized because he asks this question 
instinctively. The Book of books has 
many good words for the man who is 
not slothful, but diligent in his business. 
It goes so far as to say that such a man 
shall stand before kings. An age character- 
ized by business activity is far in advance 
of one marked by the barbaric occupations 
of hunting, fishing, and fighting. The world 
gets on largely because of the volume of 
business done in it day by day. That 
sooner or later gives rise to the refinements 
and adornments of civilization. Stagnation 
in business would mean a lessening of 
libraries and museums, colleges and churches. 
Business is, indeed, a divinely ordained 
function for the great majority of mankind, 
and millions of men are to work out their 
salvation and wield their influence in the 
world as they stand faithful to their duties 
in oflftces, shops, banking institutions, and 
manufacturing concerns. 

But when this question circumscribes 
the whole horizon of a man's life, it means 
that he is daily becoming narrow and sordid. 
He may be adding to his invested funds, 
but he is growing insensitive to all the higher 

[73] 



REAL RELIGION 



concerns of human life, to music, to art, to 
literature, to friendship, and to the public 
service. That was the kind of business man 
Phillips Brooks had in mind once when, in 
a little fit of impatience, he said, "I declare, 
I have never met a business man whom I 
thoroughly liked.'' 

Certainly, the business man who is nothing 
but a business man, who, from the time he 
rises to the time he retires, thinks of nothing 
but business, is to be pitied. When he 
has made his pile and is ready to retire, 
he will find that certain sides of his nature 
have become atrophied. He may go to 
Europe on his own private yacht, but all 
the picture galleries and beautiful churches 
and natural glories of the Old World will 
fail to move him as they would have done 
if he had not so entirely concentrated all 
his energies upon the making of money. 

Fortunate is the man who, while ambitious 
and diligent along business lines, does not 
close all the chambers of his soul to other 
interests, to the prattle of little children 
at play, to the movement of the stars in 
the heavens, to the nourishing words of 
preacher and poet, to those institutions 
which represent altruism and make for the 

[74] 



*'HOW IS BUSINESS?" 

public weal. Perhaps he will not amass 
quite as great wealth, but he will be ten- 
fold larger and nobler when he is seventy 
years old. Wordsworth is right when he 
sings: 

" The world is too much with us; late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! '* 

And Charles Dickens, in his immortal 
Christmas Carols represents the stingy 
Scrooge brought to a knowledge of his mean- 
ness by the ghost of his former partner, 
Marley. To justify himself Scrooge says 
in faltering tones, ^'But you were always 
such a good man of business, Jacob." To 
which the ghost replies in words that ought 
to sink into all our minds, ''Business! 
Mankind was my business. The common 
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, 
forbearance, and benevolence were all my 
business. The dealings of my trade were 
but a drop of water in the comprehensive 
ocean of my business!" 



[7Sl 



Off days 

"TTE is a pretty good fellow, but he 
JL X has his off days" was the comment 
of one of his friends regarding a railroad 
man well known in his community. We all 
know him, or at least men like him. To- 
day they are agreeable, obliging, approach- 
able, altogether delightful. Tomorrow they 
are as acid as vinegar, and as sullen as an 
ill-tempered dog. Just what has happened 
to justify or explain the transformation, 
no observer possesses discernment enough 
to tell, and, in fact, nothing, in the way of 
ill tidings or unpleasant experiences has be- 
fallen them. Through some unaccountable 
reason they are simply passing through an 
off day. And it is not grown people alone 
who are victims of the malady. Have we 
not known the dearest children in the world 
to be one day perfectly angelic and twenty- 
four hours thereafter perfectly anarchistic in 
temper and behavior.^ They, too, by some 
subtle process, which orthodox people would 
ascribe to the workings of an evil spirit, 
have undergone a transformation similar to 

[76] 



OFF DAYS 



that which made Dr. Jekyll into Mr. 
Hyde. 

Now the victims of off days are not to be 
harshly judged, and those of us who are more 
staid of temperament, who do not know what 
it is to jump in an instant from a mood of 
exultation to one of depression, who get up 
in the morning and go through our routine 
duties without feeling any special uplift or 
any special sag, should be patient with our 
differently constituted brethren and sisters. 
They really suffer from their occasional off 
days more than anybody who associates with 
them suffers. If, sometimes, they seem to 
rise higher than the rest of us in point of 
enthusiasm and joy, they sink lower and 
suffer more. 

And yet the victims of this malady have 
no right to succumb tamely to it and to 
impose their own depressed moods and atti- 
tudes upon their fellow men. They ought 
rather to accept the off days as a part of 
the assigned program of their lives and so 
not be surprised when they come, or to 
measure all the hope and joy of life by the 
next twenty-four hours which they are some- 
how to live through. 

The best cure for off days is to go right 

[77] 



REAL RELIGION 



along with prescribed duties. This rail- 
road man to whom I have referred is fortu- 
nate in being obliged to open the window 
of his ticket office at just such a time in 
the morning, to note the coming and going 
of trains, to attend to the numerous requests 
of the patrons of the road. His treadmill 
of duty is really his salvation, and any one 
who suffers from the same disease may well 
force himself whenever the oif day comes to 
be even more scrupulous in the performance 
of his duty and more faithful in every detail. 
Then, too, in our off days we should draw 
upon our reserves, should call to mind the 
bright, radiant days that constitute the 
real assets of a man's life. Matthew Arnold 
in one of his noblest poems says: 

"Tasks in hours of insight willed 
Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled." 

That is the reason why exuberant people 
sometimes seem to get more out of a given 
day or a given experience than people of 
more phlegmatic temperament get; namely, 
that the larger satisfactions may serve as a 
kind of reserve fund on which heavy drafts 
may be made when the clouds gather and 
the north wind blows. 

[78] 



OFF DAYS 



And maybe a person who suffers from the 
off days' disease should consider whether or 
not he may get rid altogether of the trouble. 
It may take a number of years of hard, per- 
sistent effort, but many a man has overcome 
the disposition to be depressed and ugly. 
Various weapons can be used. Health and 
exercise are important; contact with cheery 
people helps; the broadening of the mental 
horizon and the enriching of the artistic and 
musical sensibilities all fortify a man against 
the recurrence of his off days, and there is no 
better weapon than pure and vital religion. 



[79] 



"SAME OLD JOB'' 

OVER the telephone the other day I 
asked a man whom I had not seen 
for months what he was doing. "Same old 
job" was the reply, and the tone as well 
as the language indicated what he thought 
of it. It was not the note of disgust and 
open revolt, but rather that of "grin and 
bear it," of patient acquiescence in the 
inevitable, together with the abandonment 
of hope that things would ever be better. 

It seemed as if the voices of multitudes 
were speaking over the wire. I could hear 
the unvoiced complaint of the man who 
opens and shuts a gate all day long, the 
man who hands out tickets through a window, 
the man who delivers milk at the back door 
in the gray of the morning, the woman who 
stitches away on a garment, the woman 
who washes dishes, who mends the children's 
garments, the woman who attends to the 
fretful and demanding babies. In fact, the 
whole multitude of persons condemned to 
a single kind of task, and that in itself 
terribly monotonous, spoke in that one 

[80] 



"SAME OLD JOB 



man's response over the wire, "Same old 
job." 

Modern life presents no greater single 
personal problem than that of securing an 
honest and cheerful measure of service on 
the part of the multitudes to whom the 
progress and differentiation of industry has 
assigned relatively small and menial tasks 
of a treadmill character. The same personal 
problem confronts even those who have 
higher tasks, who do not have to delve and 
grind in the midst of material things, but 
who, nevertheless, do not escape that sense 
of weariness because of unyielding obstacles, 
cramping limitations, and only a moderate 
degree of success when their ambition is 
spurring them to larger achievements. And 
so it becomes a very vital question to all of 
us, how can we face the ''same old job" 
morning by morning with new courage, 
initiative, and hope? 

First, by looking at it as a new task. 
That may seem altogether impossible, if 
we have sat in the same chair or stood 
behind the same counter for ten, fifteen, or 
twenty years; but it is within the field of 
the possible, provided one has determination 
enough. Try it some day and approach 
[8i] 



REAL RELIGION 



the old duty as though you had never seen 
it before, and see if it does not present to 
you some new and inspiring aspects. 

Or we might think of the next day's 
service as the last one we should ever render. 
That might make things seem a little solemn, 
to be sure, but it would prevent us, perhaps, 
from careless and slipshod work, from leav- 
ing any raw edges for our successor to 
deal with. The wonderful thing about the 
work of Jesus Christ was that he finished 
it, left it in precisely the right shape for 
his followers to take it up and carry on. 

There is incentive, too, in trying to imagine 
how some other man would do the same 
thing. Suppose the President could spare 
a day from the White House and the over- 
sight of this nation to do your job, how would 
he approach it.^ What new ways and im- 
proved methods would he employ.^ What 
kind of a spirit would he show.^ What 
would be his attitude to his employers and 
the concern as a whole? How would he 
deal with the problem? This ''other man'' 
is not an impossibility or a myth. He may 
turn up any day, and you would better 
anticipate his coming by trying to do as 
well as he would do in your place. 

[82] 



"SAME OLD JOB 



And the last and chief source of fresh 
courage for the "same old job" is the con- 
solation of being a soldier on duty. Unless 
we get some sense of the control and guid- 
ance of our life by a higher power we shall 
be apt once and again to recoil from the 
monotony and strain and irksomeness. But 
suppose you can say, "God wants me here. 
He put me here; from all I can see he 
wants me and no one else here. When he 
wants me elsewhere, he will give me release. 
I don't deserve promotion, unless I have 
done my level best just here and now" — 
what a new phase that puts on the old 
task ! The great theologian, Horace Bushnell, 
once preached a sermon entitled, "Every 
man's life a plan of God." To fulfil that 
plan is better than to get riches or fame, 
and in the long run, in proportion as we 
do our part toward its fulfilment, we obtain 
our greatest happiness. 



[83] 



THE COURAGE TO PART WITH 
THINGS 

WE are frequently admonished to hold 
on to what we have. "Do not 
leave any articles in the car" is the injunc- 
tion of some brakemen at the end of the 
journey. Some of us acquire a passion for 
hoarding, and if we live long in one place 
accumulate a lot of things which may be 
of no earthly good to us, but which we 
are not courageous enough to throw away. 
Some rooms impress you, on entering them, 
with being cluttered; too many knicknacks 
and gewgaws. It might be a blessing to 
that family to have to move; then perhaps 
they would discriminate between the real 
and the spurious artistic adornments. 

If we all went through our personal 
belongings we should probably find a good 
many things that were better off in the waste- 
basket than in drawers and on shelves. 
Take the problem of old letters; what's 
the use of saving so many.^ Some people 
even go so far as to preserve every scrap 
of a note that comes into their possession. 

[841 



TO PART WITH THINGS 

They could produce the letter that John 
Jones wrote them in 1878 with regard to 
the state of the weather in West Podunk. 
Certain letters that have to do with great 
events and crises it is desirable to keep, 
and a man will think long before he throws 
away the tender missives he received in 
college or boarding-school from his father 
and mother. Into them went the very 
life-blood of the ones who gave him his 
being, and the counsel and love crystallized 
into written language are worth more to 
him than an inheritance of riches. 

One or two guiding principles may help 
us to discriminate concerning what we 
would better keep and what we would 
better destroy or pass on to some one else. 
In the first place, it does not pay to hold 
on to the things that hinder us from grow- 
ing. That to .which we cling may have 
served good uses in its time, but it no longer 
helps us to be better or happier. Even 
sacred mementos may sometimes be so 
violently cherished by us that they act 
as a drain upon our nervous energies and 
our moral force. I have heard recently of 
a grieving mother, who every day takes out 
a little shoe worn once by a fair laddie, 

[85] 



REAL RELIGION 



who no longer makes music in that home, but 
who has gone to the fairer life, where "their 
angels do always behold the face of my Father 
which is in heaven." 

This mother sheds copious tears each day, 
as she looks at this little memento of the 
one who was her pride and joy; but mean- 
time she is nervous, listless, out of touch 
with life, living with her memories and not 
with her hopes. So the little shoe, dear 
as it is, becomes a drag on her, even a 
chain, to keep her back from the real con- 
solation that comes to us in the presence 
of death; namely, the effort to take our 
place once again and do our work in a world 
which still holds for us joy, if we will only 
shake ourselves free of the fetters that would 
bind us to the past. 

Another guiding principle is consideration 
as to whether in the place of the things we 
are loath to part with we can substitute 
something better. You do not want, for 
example, a creed, out of which the real life 
has gone, which the discoveries of scholar- 
ship have rendered obsolete, which your 
own religious experience has already outrun. 
You do not want any text-book, or even 
story-book, the reading of which will prevent 
[86] 



TO PART WITH THINGS 

you from reading a better one. You do not 
want, my wealthy but parsimonious friend, 
the hundred dollars which some Armenian 
orphan, just bereft of his parents and hungry 
and naked, needs more than you do at this 
moment. 

Our business is with the present. Let us 
always remember that. We would better 
throw away a good many things when we 
are through with them, lest they litter up 
the place where we live, and even worse 
than that, lest they fetter our lives in the 
pursuit of the things that are most worth 
while. The really brave man is he who can 
let some things go when they have served 
their uses and have ceased to yield anything 
to the development of character. 



[87] 



LIFE ON EASY STREET 

I HAVE never been able to acquire any 
property on Easy Street, but since a 
few friends and acquaintances are just now 
residing there I am somewhat familiar with 
its life. It is an interesting and charming 
little community. I like to study it as I pay 
an occasional call or visit to the street. 

There are my friends the Welloffs, for ex- 
ample. They never had any children and 
Welloif once confided to me that neither of 
them very much cared. And when I ven- 
tured to suggest that they adopt one he 
rejoined, ''What do you take us for any- 
way!" Relieved of all parental responsi- 
bilities, they come and go as they please. 
Almost every winter they spend at least a 
few weeks in Florida or Egypt or some other 
balmy region. They are very hospitable 
when at home and I have met in their 
drawing-room some of the leading artists 
and musicians of the city. Once in a while 
they develop a rather ephemeral interest in 
some popular charity, and Mrs. WellofF was 
for one season the president of the Anti- 
[88] 



LIFE ON EASY STREET 

Public Expectoration League. I like to dine 
at the Weiloffs. The eight courses are al- 
ways delicious and faultlessly served as well. 
Their house is full of fascinating antiques and 
curios from all parts of the world. Somehow, 
I miss, however, the little shoes and dollies 
that might be here or there. But Mrs. Well- 
off is very fond of her canary and once sat up 
nearly all night to tend it 'when it was sick. 
Just opposite the Weiloffs is the fine stone 
mansion which belongs to my college class- 
mate. Jack Chameleon, or to speak more 
exactly, to his wife, for after Jack had 
struggled along two or three years in his 
profession, a rich and estimable young lady 
captured his fancies and responded to his 
advances. They are now enrolled among 
the substantial people of the town. They 
have a number of children and plenty of 
servants to look after them, though they 
themselves never scant their parental duties. 
Perhaps it is my imagination, but it has 
seemed to me as if Chameleon ceased to 
feel the pressure upon him of the fight for 
daily bread, for he was poorer than most 
of us in college. Chameleon has undergone 
quite a cooling of professional ambitions. 
Though he maintains nominally office hours 

[89] 



REAL RELIGION 



they are well inside the limit of even a 
seven-hour working day. Not that he has 
altogether degenerated intellectually, but 
when I asked him the other day about 
that book which used to glow in his imagi- 
nation as a possibility of the future before 
he met Mrs. C, he jokingly replied, "Oh, 
well, there are a lot of books of that type 
afloat now and if I should ever get mine out I 
doubt if it would find the public. Come over 
and play golf, won't you, some afternoon.?" 
There is another house on Easy Street 
where I call occasionally, but not so fre- 
quently as when little Elsie Sweetface was 
just beginning to toddle. What a fascina- 
ting little creature she was then! She is 
very pretty now at nine, but somehow 
her face often takes on a discontented 
and petulant expression. Things have been 
made very easy for Elsie all these nine 
years. The understanding was that if she 
cried for a thing she had better have it. 
"Get along with her as easily as you can," 
I once heard her mother remark to the nurse. 
She was bathed and clothed and fed long 
after the time when she ought to have begun 
to attend to these daily processes herself. 
When the public school proved a little hard 

[90] 



LIFE ON EASY STREET 

she was sent to a private school. Indeed, 
her entire life has been ordered from the 
point of view of what would be most easy 
and agreeable for Elsie. I wonder if at 
thirty or even at eighteen she will thank 
her parents for their over-indulgence of her. 
As you drive through Easy Street and 
view the well-kept lawns and comfortable 
dwellings the tone of things gratifies all your 
esthetic susceptibilities. And I know some 
people on the street who are living just as 
earnest and self-sacrificing lives as are being 
lived anywhere in the world today. Indeed 
I sometimes have a drawing toward Easy 
Street myself. And yet if these are the 
alternatives I know which I would choose 
for myself and children. As between Easy 
Street and a flabby intellect and Hardship 
Lane with an alert and acquisitive mind, 
as between Easy Street with a dull con- 
science and Hardship Lane with an active 
one, as between Easy Street with a patroniz- 
ing, condescending spirit and Hardship Lane 
with a truly democratic one, as between Easy 
Street with an ossifying heart and Hardship 
Lane with sympathies as wide as the world, 
I can decide in one second which I would 
choose. 

[91] 



THE STANDSTILLS OF LIFE 

YOU are traveling a crowded, narrow 
thoroughfare. The stream of human- 
ity advances slowly and with many turns 
and twists. In the street the drays, wagons, 
and motor vehicles barely crawl along. Sud- 
denly everything stops. Something has hap- 
pened to impede further progress in any 
direction. It makes no difference how impor- 
tant your engagement somewhere else, you 
must wait until the policeman straightens 
out the tangle. 

Sometimes in the early spring after a mild 
period that has started the buds there comes 
a succession of chilly, dreary days. The faint 
signs of new vegetation grow no more pro- 
nounced. It looks as if there has been a 
relapse into winter and you say, "Summer 
will never come." 

The business of a great nation, which has 
moved forward for a number of years by 
leaps and bounds, returning rich rewards to 
those who conduct it, suddenly suffers an 
arrest. The chill of an inexplicable fear lays 
its paralyzing hand upon many industries. 

[92] 



STANDSTILLS OF LIFE 

"The country is all right," you say, "but 
there is no gainsaying the fact that we have 
come to a halt for the present." A reform 
movement is strongly inaugurated and moves 
on splendidly for a while. But before long 
the wheels drive hard. Popular interest 
flags. The champions of this worthy cause 
are subjected to ridicule and even abuse. 
It begins to look as if they were visionary 
and too much in advance of public senti- 
ment. The movement halts or even appar- 
ently recedes. 

A strong, ambitious man with far-reaching 
plans only half realized is suddenly laid low 
on a bed of illness. The interests with which 
he has been identified suffer. Another may 
be found to take up his work, at least in part, 
but his own career halts for a time, the length 
of which he can only conjecture; invalidism 
holds him as its prisoner. 

Now what shall we say about these stand- 
stills of life which in one form or another 
few of us escape.^ First, that, irritating as 
they are, they are meant to make us broader 
and better men and women. We may be 
too intent on one end. We must be made 
to think about something else for a little 
while. We may be and probably are far 

[93] 



REAL RELIGION 



too self-absorbed and self-centered. So we 
are suddenly, and, as we think, almost ruth- 
lessly halted in order that our thought and 
sympathy may flow out in other directions. 

Again the period of standstill may be 
utilized by us to good advantage. While 
you are waiting for the street blockade to 
cease you can patronize the apple woman, 
or send your thought above high buildings 
to the blue dome of heaven. While business 
halts, you can reexamine your commercial 
methods and projects in the light of the 
highest ethical standards. While your pet 
reform suff'ers a temporary eclipse you can 
ask whether the intensity of your zeal is 
matched with a spirit of patience and a 
good temper that refuses to be disconcerted 
even under adverse criticism. While you 
are ill you can make your sick-room as 
Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry Drum- 
mond made theirs, a place of peace and of 
unfailing cheeriness for those who resort 
thither. 

Depend upon it, the standstills of life are 
among its most blessed boons. They have 
their great compensations, and whatever is 
worth while in our characters and in our 
purposes will suffer no permanent arrest. 

[94] 



SNAP JUDGMENTS 

WHAT an ungracious thing it was in 
that dignified banker to refuse to 
recognize you on the street the other day. 
It is not the first time, either, that he has 
been so discourteous. It cannot be that 
he did not know you, for you have talked 
with him half a dozen times. It] must be 
that he is an aristocrat, pure and simple. 

The young woman who conversed so vol- 
ubly at the boarding-house table the other 
night, in fact monopolizing the conversation 
and dealing chiefly in frivolities, surely can- 
not stand for much in the intellectual or 
moral realm. A pity it is that so many of 
our American girls are given over to dress, 
display, and society chit-chat, with no interest 
in better things. 

How lacking in neighborhood spirit is that 
family which moved into the big house on 
the boulevard a few months ago ! The mem- 
bers do not seem disposed either to make or 
to return calls. They seldom show them- 
selves at public gatherings. Evidently they 
consider themselves quite above the ordinary 

[95] 



REAL RELIGION 



run of their fellow men and are entirely lack- 
ing in community spirit. 

Is there any stingier man in town than 
the rich merchant who turns down so many 
subscription papers presented to him at his 
office? He could easily afford to subsidize 
almost any of the causes which seek his 
charity. He must be hoarding all his money 
for his distant relatives since he has no near 
ones. 

Thus we go on adding snap judgment to 
snap judgment, basing our impressions on a 
very limited acquaintance, and not hesita- 
ting to circulate our opinion broadcast. Now 
what are the facts .'^ 

The courtly old banker is really every inch 
a gentleman. He would never knowingly 
slight any one. But he often gets absorbed 
in trains of thought which so preoccupy his 
mind that, as he walks along the street, he 
practically sees no one, or if his gaze happens 
to rest upon others they have no more indi- 
viduality than the lamp-posts. It may be 
an unfortunate habit, but it gives no true 
idea of his real disposition. 

She whom you denominated frivolous was 
trying to liven up a rather somber company 
around the dinner-table and she was espe- 

[96] 



SNAP JUDGMENTS 

cially anxious to lift her aunt, whose pro- 
tege she is, out of the dumps. This is the 
reason why her conversation rippled along. 
She was trying to recall the interesting and 
laughable incidents of the day for the sake 
of others, when it would have been much 
more agreeable to her to keep silent. The 
truth is, she is a wide reader and a thorough 
student. She gives an afternoon each week 
to visit among the poor. She dresses well, 
but why shouldn't she? She has plenty of 
money. But she is far from being a heart- 
less society girl. 

And that family that holds itself so aloof 
from the life of the town has its own special 
sorrow. There are good and sufficient rea- 
sons why they do not invite people to their 
home or mingle in the life of the neighbor- 
hood. Some time the skeleton in the closet 
will depart and then their neighbors will 
know how good and friendly they really 
are. 

The stingy curmudgeon who turns down 
the subscription papers gives every week far 
more money than most of his critics give in 
ten years. He has a large number of private 
charities; he makes a specialty of widows and 
orphans. He bestows many gifts where the 

[97] 



REAL RELIGION 



name of the donor is never known to the re- 
cipient. He is averse to subscription papers 
and he does not care to exploit his own per- 
sonality by affixing his name to libraries, 
schools, and colleges. 

Let us beware of snap judgments. Let 
us construe our fellow men, their motives and 
actions, in a large, generous fashion. If it is 
possible to infer something to their credit 
from their behavior, even though on the sur- 
face it might appear rather discreditable to 
them, let us seek, if possible, to discover and 
promulgate a more favorable interpretation, 
and in cases where that more favorable con- 
struction does not easily appear, why not 
suspend judgment for a while .^ 

Remember, too, that we are all liable to 
be the victims of snap judgments. The great 
teacher of Nazareth spoke golden words 
when he said to his disciples, ^^ Judge not, 
that ye be not judged. For with what . . . 
measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto 
you again." 



[98] 



THE ART OF APPRECIATION 

ONCE on a time a lad employed in a 
home of wealth and culture, much to 
everybody's surprise, gave up his job of run- 
ning errands and scouring the brasses, and 
departed. A friend asked him why he had 
acted thus. "Weren't you well fed.?" "Yes." 
"Weren't you well paid?" "Yes." "Weren't 
you well treated.?" "Yes." "What was the 
matter then.?" "Well, I'll tell you. They 
treated me well enough and it's likely that 
at the next place I won't get as much money 
or as comfortable a bed. But I just wanted 
them to say once in a while, ^ Well done, little 
oe. 
Little Joe spoke for a great many people 
besides himself. After one has done his little \ 
best over and over again, and studied to 
please in every particular, he is hardly human 
if he does not crave a bit of appreciation. 
Not that the right-minded person cares for 
flattery. He abhors that and suspects the / 
one who brings it of some ulterior designs. 
But appreciation is an altogether different 
article from fawning praise. It is the just 

[99] 



REAL RELIGION 



and accurate estimate of work done and 
service rendered. 

How many persons who receive benefits of 
various kinds accept them quite as a matter 
of course. A friend of mine, through his 
personal influence at Washington, helped to 
secure a pension for the widow of a soldier. 
It amounted to several hundred dollars annu- 
ally, and when I remarked, " She must have 
been mighty grateful to you," my friend re- 
plied with a cynical little shrug, "She never 
thanked me.'' 

Let there be more appreciativeness in the 
home. You'll get quicker and more com- 
plete obedience from that fine but sometimes 
very perplexing boy of yours if you make 
him aware that you note with approval the 
struggles he does make to toe the mark, the 
self-denial he now and then practises in order 
to comply with your wishes. To bring up 
children in an atmosphere which lacks the 
elements that parental fondness and appre- 
ciativeness contribute to it is like putting a 
tender tropical plant into the hard, cold 
ground on a November day. Children in 
the home, pupils in the school thrive and 
blossom into strong and lovely characters 
when they have the proper amount of ap- 
[loo] 



ART OF APPRECIATION 

preclation. On the other hand, the boys and 
girls themselves need to appreciate their 
parents, and it is to be feared that in this 
age, when parents are doing more for their 
children than ever before, there has not been 
a corresponding increase of deference and 
considerateness on the part of the children. 

In the shop and factory there is the same 
righteous demand for appreciation, not of 
laziness or slipshod work, but of fidelity, of 
long-continued acceptable service, of the con- 
tribution which even the humblest worker is 
making to the success of the concern. Our 
labor problem would be nearer solution if em- 
ployers oftener said, "Well done, little Joe." 

The church is another field for the exercise 
of the art of appreciation. If your pastor 
helps you, tell him so. Don't be afraid of 
spoiling him. Ministers don't spoil so easily 
nowadays. That was a beautiful motto 
which a church once put on the wall to 
welcome a pastor returning from a long 
vacation, ''We love you and we tell you so." 

Let's begin this next week and be more 
appreciative. And does not courtesy, to 
say nothing now of higher considerations, 
demand that now and then, at least, we 
say ''Thank you" to God.? 

[lOl] 



OUR HUMAN ISLANDS 

DID you ever live or sojourn on an 
island? If so, can you remember 
lying upon the sands some midsummer day 
and listening to the gentle splashing of the 
waters or watching the far-away sails ? Your 
idle revery made more acute your sense of 
detachment from the mainland, of isolation 
from the great world of aifairs, of being 
shut in with your own thoughts and emo- 
tions, and, as it were, cut off from former 
associations and interests. That must have 
been the feeling of the great Napoleon when 
exiled on the island of St. Helena, and that 
must have made the punishment peculiarly 
bitter for one who had figured so conspicu- 
ously in European politics. 

Herein is a parable. We are all more or 
less islanders. We send out our little boats 
that meet, salute, and pass one another and 
perhaps exchange commodities, but still we 
are separated by great gulfs and inlets from 
our fellow men. We live under the same 
roof with our kindred, we work in the same 
store with those whom we have known from 
[102] 



OUR HUMAN ISLANDS 

childhood, we go in and out on the trains 
year after year with the same people, and 
yet how far apart we may be from them in 
all the movement of our inner life, in our 
hopes and ideals, in our thought of God 
and duty and heaven. Scientists tell us 
that even the tiny molecules do not touch 
one another, but whirl about in space in 
their independent orbits. And how few 
human lives really meet and melt into a 
common purpose. 

Pathetic from some points of view indeed 
is this isolation. It certainly makes a great 
appeal for charity in our judgment of others. 
Said a woman who had recently lost her 
husband, "I am sorry to decline invitations 
to social functions. I don't want to be self- 
ish in my grief, but whenever I go to places 
where I used to go with him, the sense of his 
absence is so keen that I can hardly bear it. 
It seems as if I were living on an island. My 
life is so partial, so incomplete, so broken, 
that I cannot enter heartily and joyously 
into the old pleasures and merrymakings. 
My greater half is gone. People about me 
do not begin to realize how far away in 
spirit I am from them.'' This widow repre- 
sents the great army of the bereaved, toward 
[103] 



REAL RELIGION 



whom we who have not thus suffered should 
extend the utmost consideration and not let 
our own joy in earthly things jar upon their 
lonely spirits. 

Sympathy and tact are needed, too. There 
comes a time when every growing boy draws 
apart from his mother. She finds it hard to 
understand his reserve; she yearns for the 
old confidential relationship. But let her 
not chafe under the new conditions. Her 
boy is undergoing those pangs of self-dis- 
covery which accompany the first experience 
of adolescence; he is coming to a knowledge 
of his own individuality; he will have to 
dwell apart for a time on his island. But if 
he has been surrounded by right influences 
hitherto, he will in due time reestablish the 
precious relationship with his mother, though 
on a different plane. 

The girl comes home, having completed 
her college course. She is no longer a girl, 
but a young woman. It is hard for her to 
adjust herself to her old place in the family. 
Her parents feel a difference in her. Mis- 
understandings may easily grow up if the 
parents insist on too great close conformity 
to former practises. Give her time to work 
out her personal problem. As she retires 
[104] 



OUR HUMAN ISLANDS 

into her island, believe that she will learn 
lessons there to be gained nowhere else. 

On the other hand, people conscious of the 
gulf between them and others should beware 
of becoming narrow and provincial. One 
whose own life has become sharply defined 
from others should not be proud of his 
isolation nor let the spirit of reticence and 
detachment grow upon him. We are still 
a part of the human race, sharers in the 
great elemental human passions. We must 
not become hermits and anchorites. 

The last book of the Bible was written by 
a man living on an island, who apparently 
fretted sometimes over his limitations and 
looked eagerly forward to the time when 
there should be "no more sea" cutting him 
off from continents and empires. And the 
ideal for all of us sooner or later is so to link 
our lives to others that, without sacrificing 
our personality, we shall feel the thrill and 
inspiration of kinship with humanity. That 
time ought to come sooner or later for all of 
us. As a poet has said, 

" When we are dead, when you and I are dead. 
Have rent and tossed aside each earthly fetter, 
Have wiped the grave dust from our wondering eyes. 
And stand together fronting the sunrise, 
I think that we shall know each other better." 

[105] 



REAL RELIGION 



But we need not wait for death to bring 
us into closer, tenderer relations to others. 
While we are still island dwellers, we may 
hoist our beacons and send forth over the 
waves the gleam of a friendly light. 



[io6] 



THE RESERVES IN HUMAN NATURE 

NOTHING is more admirable in the 
being called man than the power he 
possesses to rise to an emergency and by 
drawing upon his reserves to meet bravely 
an unexpected test or carry to successful 
conclusion a difficult undertaking. 

Think of the reserves of patience which en- 
able the mother, for example, to endure the 
demands which careless and sometimes irri- 
tating children make upon her. The child- 
less woman looks on with wonder. She has 
never taken any lessons in the school of 
parenthood and therefore she has not stored 
up a supply of that particular grace which 
a mother needs. And the manual laborer 
is another person whose supply of patience 
challenges respect. He has to have it in 
order to keep at his monotonous task day 
after day and fulfil with almost machine- 
like precision his part in the social and in- 
dustrial scheme. There are in many a man 
also reserves of heroism. As you see Smith 
or Jones on the prosaic plane of their daily 
existence, you might not pick either of them 
[107] 



REAL RELIGION 



out as conspicuous examples of the heroic, 
and they are both, like the rest of us, blends 
of strength and weakness. But wait a bit. 
Something may happen tonight or tomorrow 
that will make this same Jones or Smith a 
popular hero. He will be rushing into a 
burning building and rescuing a sleeping 
child, or he will stand at his post on the 
front of the car when by jumping he might 
avoid a serious accident that may maim him 
for life. Or he will meet some financial re- 
verse or some personal bereavement with a 
fortitude of which we had never suspected 
him to be capable. 

"Hurrah for Jones!" we will be saying. 
What good stuif there is in him, isn't there .'^ 
Even more beautiful and inspiring are the 
reserves of kindness and generosity which 
multitudes of men and women possess and 
draw upon readily when they are demanded. 
The world is far more tender than it was in 
former ages. How the millions of dollars do 
roll up when a great catastrophe does its 
devastating work! Cheerful, unforced giving 
it is, the fruit of real sympathy and pity. 
Bravo for human nature, we say again, as men 
of all creeds and no creeds unite to mitigate 
the woes of sufferers thousands of miles away. 
[io8] 



HUMAN NATURE 



And what we witness on a large scale is 
duplicated daily in every city and hamlet of 
the land on a small scale as neighbor goes to 
neighbor on some errand of help or comfort, 
as friend stands by friend in distress, as 
brothers spring to the succor of their brothers 
who have fallen behind in the race. 

Yes, indeed, this poor weak humanity of 
ours is capable of far greater things than is 
often realized. And each individual can do 
more and bear more, and when the pinch 
comes lend a stronger hand to others than 
we have been in the habit of doing, if we 
will only call out our reserves. And we can 
face temptation, too, and down it in reliance 
upon these same reserves of character. We 
need never, even when sorely pressed, yield 
a single point to the enemy of our souls if 
we bethink ourselves of the reenforcements 
within easy call. 

Of course, the securing of these reserves 
is a matter of forethought and of planning. 
We shall never have any reserves in the bank 
to draw upon when the proverbial rainy day 
comes, if we do not begin to save now. We 
shall never have any funds of valuable infor- 
mation to enrich our lives and the lives of 
others unless we improve our present chance 
[109] 



REAL RELIGION 



to study, read, and acquire facts and truths. 
We shall never have any reserves of virtue 
which may save the day for us, as the arrival 
of Bliicher saved the day for Wellington at 
Waterloo, unless we commence at once to 
lead virtuous, self-denying, and sympathetic 
lives. 



[no] 



THE GOOD LISTENER 

ON my morning walk I frequently find 
myself behind two gentlemen who 
usually accompany each other to their places 
of business. Both are men of culture and of 
standing in the community. Yet I notice 
that one does nearly all the talking. He 
seems extremely interested in his own views 
and presents them to his companion with 
much animation. Sometimes he gesticulates 
vigorously. I am seldom near enough to play 
unintentionally the part of eavesdropper, but 
I should judge that a variety of timely and 
profitable themes were being discussed, as 
might naturally be expected when men get 
to be pretty intimate acquaintances. But 
the silence of one of these men and the 
volubility of the other are what impress me, 
and I find myself wishing that the lips of 
Mr. Ready-to-Talk would be sealed for a 
while in order to give the man w^ho listens 
to him with such uniform politeness a 
chance to air his views; for being a man of 
ideas and of convictions, he certainly has 
something well worth saying. 

[Ill] 



REAL RELIGION 



These men represent two types. One has 
cultivated the art of expression and the 
other the art of listening. One art is per- 
haps as important as the other, but does not 
the listening capacity come first in order of 
time? If as a child you did not listen to 
your parents, your teacher, your minister, 
if you did not learn to hold your attention 
firmly upon the speaker, if you did not gain 
some comprehension of the fact that the 
acquisition of knowledge depends on the 
ability to listen at the right time and in 
the right way to the right person, then 
you are to be pitied. The single, beautiful 
glimpse we have of the boyhood of the Per- 
fect Child reveals him in the temple among 
the doctors "both hearing them, and asking 
them questions." Even one possessed with 
wisdom far beyond his years needed to main- 
tain all through his life the attitude of a 
listener. 

When we undertake to cooperate with 
others we find it essential to listen to what 
they have to say. Have you never talked 
with a person who, you were absolutely sure, 
was not hearing a word you said, though for 
politeness' sake he tried to appear as if he 
were listening.^ But he was only waiting 

[112] 



THE GOOD LISTENER 

for you to get through so that he could 
ventilate his own opinions, A genuine con- 
versation with that sort of person is an 
impossibility. He is to all practical pur- 
poses a soliloquist. He seeks your society 
for the moment, not because he wants to 
know your views, but because he cannot 
repress his own any longer. 

The more civil attitude, the attitude which 
enables men actually to confer on subjects of 
common interest, presupposes that one's own 
information is not complete and that the 
other man or the other group of men has 
something to offer which will instruct and 
enrich you. 

These are days when it is of the utmost 
importance for each of us to cultivate the 
listening attitude, to be hospitable to new 
ideas, at least to the extent of informing 
ourselves as to exactly what those who ad- 
vocate them mean. Here is a new theory 
of the inspiration of the Bible, here is a new 
program for our social and industrial rela- 
tionships. Why should we close our ears 
to its advocates? Who knows but we may 
hear something to our lasting advantage? 
There are voices not of earth to which it 
pays us to turn a listening ear occasionally. 

[113] 



REAL RELIGION 



There is no deafness so deplorable as that 
which prevents us from hearing what God 
would say to us, in the quiet of the dawn 
or in the lull that comes at sunset, in the 
solitude of the woods and along crowded 
human highways. Let us take to heart 
Longfellow's exquisite lines: 

" Listen to voices in the upper air, 
Lose not thy simple faith in mysteries. 



1 



[114] 



HUMAN BEINGS AS LINKS 

"T'M only a link," said one of the most 
A useful women in the world laughingly 
the other day. She was referring to the 
fact that she had recently been the means 
of bringing together a youth who wanted 
to work and an employer of labor who was 
looking for that kind of a fellow. That is 
just what she has been doing in one way and 
another all the sixty years of her modest 
and unselfish career. A wide acquaintance 
in the working classes, together with an 
entree into circles of wealth and influence, 
has given her the joy and privilege of act- 
ing as a go-between in almost innumerable 
cases. So if there is in her community a 
middle-aged spinster desirous of a position 
as housekeeper, or a lady wanting a com- 
panion for a European trip, or a weary 
mother eager for a helper with her children, 
or a young man anxious for a chance to 
work for his board while taking a course 
in architecture or engineering, or a Sunday- 
school superintendent seeking in despair a 
bright teacher for a class of restless boys, it 

[115] 



REAL RELIGION 



has come to be a matter of course for those 
acquainted with the situation to say, "Oh, 
go to Miss Greatheart, she'll know the right 
party." 

We all owe a good deal to the people who 
serve as links between ourselves and some- 
thing worth having. Think over the good 
things that have come to you through the 
years and see if they are not associated with 
some individuals who served as the medium. 
The teacher who induced you to choose a 
certain career, the friend who introduced 
you to the woman who became your wife, 
the minister who conducted you to the 
point where you made connection with some 
great and inspiring truth — what were they 
but links, and because they did their duty as 
links you are where you are today. And 
so in a multitude of lesser instances the 
human link was equally important even if 
those who served as such were not always 
conscious of the favor they were doing you. 

One day years ago a young man was stand- 
ing on the banks of an Oriental river with 
two companions. Suddenly a fourth young 
man appeared. "Behold him," remarked 
the leader to the other two, and there was 
something in the radiant countenance of the 
[ii6] 



HUMAN BEINGS AS LINKS 

stranger and something in the tone in which 
their friend referred to him that led the two 
to follow up the stranger. After cultivating 
his acquaintance a few hours they went forth 
to say the same word, ^'Behold," to their 
own particular friends, and from that day 
to this the Christian Church has been re- 
cruited because one and another have been 
willing to say, "Behold," and thus to serve 
as links between the founder of Chris- 
tianity and those who had not made his 
acquaintance. 

To be a good link requires, it is true, 
some self-effacement and much considera- 
tion for others. A young woman started 
on a journey the other day and just as the 
train moved out of the station a gentleman 
entered whom she knew, accompanied by a 
young woman whom he placed in the next 
seat. Then he introduced the young women, 
saying, '^ You'll have a good talk together 
on your way." Ah, but that was just what 
young lady number one didn't want, for she 
was tired. But overcoming her reluctance 
sh^ entered on a long and what proved to 
be a mutually interesting conversation. As a 
result young woman number two is in social 
settlement work in the Hawaiian Islands 

[117] 



REAL RELIGION 



today. That outcome was furthest from her 
thoughts when she entered the train, and 
she owes her present place to the fact that 
her chance acquaintance on the train who 
knew of the position took pains then and 
later to guide her to it. 

Every good person, from the statesman 
striving to bind the nations closer together 
to the humblest mother strengthening the 
ties between her children and God and 
truth, is a link, and there is no more hon- 
orable calling in life. 



[Ii8] 



ONE GOOD LIFE 

MUCK-RAKING and cynicism to the 
contrary, the world is full of good 
lives. All about us are men and women as 
pure as gold and as true as steel. They are 
not perfect, but are in the process of becoming 
perfect. We ought not to overlook them in 
this age when the seamy side of life so often 
flaunts itself in our face. We ought not to 
be so absorbed in our quest for wealth or 
pleasure as to fail to do them honor. The 
attention which they get in the newspapers 
is no measure of their worth or influence. 
They are the salt that keeps our civiliza- 
tion from decay, the leaven that is grad- 
ually purifying the world. 

I want briefly to tell the story of one 
good life that has just gone out, or, it would 
be truer to say, gone forward at the age of 
fourscore. The notice of her death occu- 
pied about four lines in the press of the 
city where she had lived most of her days. 
She was an "old maid" and she lived much 
of her life in a boarding-house. She was 
a wage-earner until advancing age made it 

[119] 



REAL RELIGION 



impossible to go to and fro to her daily 
tasks. In her declining years she had to 
accept the friendly service of those not of 
her kin, for she outlived her relatives. 
She had to pass through one of the bitterest 
of all experiences; namely, that of being set 
one side from the busy world and of being 
compelled in comparative obscurity, and for- 
gotten by many who once knew her, to await 
the will of God. 

This woman never knew the comfort of a 
home of her own, the bliss of happy wife- 
hood, the exquisite joy of motherhood, the 
wholesome delights that go with a circle of 
lovely and interesting friends. Her working 
days, prolonged far beyond those of most 
working women, were laborious and monot- 
onous. Vacations were infrequent and brief. 
As the world estimates values she lived a 
narrow, dull, and tiresome life. 

But did she? Let me tell you what the 
minister said at her funeral. He had known 
her long and well and all that he said was 
corroborated by those associated with her 
day by day. Three qualities, he remarked, 
shone in her. The first was steadfastness. 
She could be counted on to reach the estab- 
lishment punctually in the morning and all 
[120] 



ONE GOOD LIFE 



day long to do her work promptly and 
thoroughly. The next quality was quiet- 
ness. The fever of this hustling, rustling age 
never made her nervous and excitable. An 
atmosphere of tranquillity perpetually sur- 
rounded her. The next trait was cheerfulness. 
Though every day brought its temptations to 
irritability she succeeded in wearing a happy 
countenance. She saw the funny side of fussy 
and disagreeable people who made all sorts 
of unreasonable demands upon her and she 
would slip a quiet little chuckle up her sleeve 
as she discerned the foibles of her fellow 
men. She found it possible to be uniformly 
pleasant even in a boarding-house. These 
three qualities, the minister went on to 
say, made her efficient. She actually accom- 
plished a vast deal of useful work during her 
long lifetime. The possession of such quali- 
ties — steadfastness, quietness, and good 
temper — will make any one capable and of 
service in the world. 

Now this is not an obituary of a brilliant 
woman, but a side-light or two upon a typical 
average good life. We all know such lives 
among our friends and acquaintances. It is 
well to strew flowers upon the graves of our 
heroic dead, to compose long eulogies of men 

[121] 



REAL RELIGION 



and women of distinction, but let the praises 
of inconspicuous goodness also be sung. 

A good life — what a priceless contribu- 
tion it makes to human welfare and progress! 
When such lives go from us, let us thank God 
for them; while they are still with us let us 
revere and cherish them. 

" The dear Lord's best interpreters 

Are humble, human souls; 
The gospel of a life like theirs 

Is more than books or scrolls. 
From scheme and creed the light goes out, 

The saintly fact survives, 
The blessed Master none can doubt, 

Revealed in holy lives." 



[122] 



A MAN AND HIS ECHO 

ONE of the earliest and most vivid rec- 
ollections of boyhood days is in con- 
nection with a visit to a farmer uncle, who 
took me where I could hear a famous echo. 
As he threw his powerful voice against 
the cliffs a number of yards away, back it 
came to him, repeating almost instantly and 
with wonderful clearness his exact words. 
It seemed to my boyish fancy a remarkable 
thing that there could be such a reproduc- 
tion of human tone after it had once left the 
lips. But since then I have heard other 
echoes, some of them quite noted ones, and 
I have come to apprehend the laws of 
sound governing their production. But an 
echo is still to me one of the most interest- 
ing and suggestive of natural phenomena. 

As I have gone on in years, I have been 
fortunate enough to encounter the echoes of 
human lives that have transmitted some- 
thing of their personality to me long 
after they have vanished from the earth. 
The first was the echo of a soldier uncle 
who fainted under the rays of the fierce 
[123] 



REAL RELIGION 



southern sun, giving his life for his country 
just as truly as if he had fallen in battle 
when charging the foe. I was but a wee 
baby when he marched bravely away with 
his regiment and, of course, he never in- 
fluenced me personally, but in the forty 
years since he met a soldier's death, echoes 
of him have been repeatedly coming to my 
ears, in the abundant testimony of his sur- 
viving comrades to his manliness and kind- 
ness in camp and on the march, in the 
tributes to his sterling Christian character 
from men who worked at the same car- 
penter's bench, and in the veneration still 
felt for him in the church of which he was 
a modest and devoted member. 

In college the echoes of men who had pre- 
ceded us resounded through the dormitories 
and recitation rooms. Figures that we never 
saw became real to the eye of the imagina- 
tion as we learned about the athletic prowess 
of this man, the scholarly achievements of 
another, the rare personal charm and influ- 
ence of still another. Every great school has 
its splendid traditions of men who wrought 
nobly in student days and then went out to 
live useful and honorable lives. 

As I have resided in one community after 
[124] 



A MAN AND HIS ECHO 

another, I have always heard about former 
residents who had died or moved away 
before I came, but who were still held in 
affectionate esteem and whose absence was 
continually mourned. They were invari- 
ably the progressive, public-spirited men 
who could be relied on in emergencies, who 
helped to initiate and carry through under- 
takings bearing on the public welfare, who 
were not always scheming to get what they 
could out of their fellow citizens, but to con- 
tribute all they could to the happiness and 
prosperity of others. 

What a splendid thing it is to leave behind 
you such an echo that the Scripture will 
be literally fulfilled, "He being dead yet 
speaketh." The tone quality is perpetuated 
in what others say and think about you. 
It pervades the region to such an extent 
that those who come after us cannot help 
discovering intimations here and there of 
what we were and what we did. 

What cheer there is also in this thought 
for those of us who feel that our lives are 
running away without our accomplishing 
much. But we are to be judged not simply 
by the impression we make today, but by 
the echo that will come back days hence 

[125] 



REAL RELIGION 



to those who may never see us in the flesh. 
^'That man stood for the right when it 
was unpopular to do so." ^'That woman 
gave herself most patiently and unsparingly 
for her children.'' "That man was never 
too busy to be kind." So the echoes will 
come back in one form and another. Much 
depends on the man. The echo of Judas 
Iscariot's life still reverberates in the caverns 
and the tombs of human life while the echo 
of Jesus of Nazareth is like the pealing of 
sweet bells at eventide. 



[126] 



THE MOTHER'S PART 

SAID a well-known public speaker the 
other day In an address on the rela- 
tive rights and duties of husband and wife, 
''I refuse to admit that I am the only 
breadwinner In my family. I consider that 
my wife contributes no small share to the 
ongoing of the family life." Amen to that 
manly sentiment! Cold cash does not meas- 
ure, as it could not buy, the services of a 
mother In the home, for which she usually 
gets only her own board and clothes. No 
eight-hour or even ten-hour day for her. 
She is often on duty from sunrise to sunrise 
again. If she were paid on the scale that 
hired girls are paid she might have a snug 
little sum in the bank at the end of the 
year. Then, again, how frequently she adds 
to the family exchequer by holding back the 
husband from foolish speculations. Many a 
woman has by her forethought, prudence, 
and thrift saved her husband from financial 
ruin. 

This Is the lowest plane on which to view 
the work of a mother. She constantly has 
[127] 



REAL RELIGION 



to put to use her ingenuity and wit in be- 
half of the higher interests of the home. She 
needs and she often possesses the insight and 
judicial qualities of a justice of the supreme 
court in order to settle the little disputes 
between the children. She must be a dip- 
lomat and harmonize conflicting personali- 
ties. I talked the other evening with a 
mother who for twenty-five long years had 
played the part of peacemaker. Her hus- 
band's mother had always lived in the house 
and had been always lavish of her criticisms 
of the children, whom she considered not 
nearly as perfect as her own son had been. 
So the grandchildren had grown up resent- 
ful of grandma's interference and harsh 
judgments, and the gentle mother had all 
she could do to keep the atmosphere of the 
home sweet and friendly. ''But," she said 
with gratitude and gladness in her tone, "I 
believe I have succeeded fairly well in har- 
monizing the family, and though it has been 
hard, it is all right." 

This, indeed, is the crowning glory of 
motherhood — to be able to quiet and steady 
and ennoble the life of husband and bairns, 
through her wise, loving influence constantly 
though unobtrusively exercised. If it were 

[128] 



THE MOTHER'S PART 

not so common a phenomenon we should 
marvel more than we do at the wonderful 
patience of mothers. When a girl goes to a 
college settlement for a year or two to take 
care of other folks' children we clap our 
hands and say, ^^What self-denial, what de- 
votion!" But I should like to know if it is 
any more noble to fetch and carry for other 
people's children for a year or two than it is 
for one's own for a long lifetime. 

Of course the mother gets something out 
of it. She ought to. Besides the love her 
husband and children bear her, she grows in- 
tellectually and spiritually. She keeps pace 
with the children in their studies. She learns 
lessons in self-control that only a mother can 
learn. She rounds out into a beautiful and 
symmetrical womanhood, and though she 
may not be as accomplished as her maiden 
sister in music and art, she is not one whit 
behind her in the essentials of a genuine 
education. 

Let us value our mothers, then, while we 
have them. James A. Garfield never did a 
nobler thing than when, after he had taken 
the oath to be loyal to the duties Involved 
in the Presidency of the United States, he 
turned and kissed his venerable mother. 
[129] 



REAL RELIGION 



Our mothers are our good angels. Let us 
never make them our slaves. Let us think 
of them in the midst of our good times. 
Let us plan for their pleasure and comfort. 
And let us begin at once so to do. 



[130] 



ALL HAIL to THE BREADWINNER 

THE other day a little bevy of people 
entered a railway restaurant and took 
possession of a table. There were four chil- 
dren to begin with, all of school age, besides 
a toddling youngster. There was a youngish- 
appearing woman who seemed to be acting 
in the capacity of a mother's helper and a 
woman, with a good many wrinkles in her 
face, who was plainly the mother of the little 
tribe. Last of all came the father, well 
loaded down with bundles and of a serious 
not to say solemn demeanor. He took his 
seat at the head of the table and told the 
waiter to bring four orders of chops and 
potatoes with a "side" of cold tongue. 
The family was evidently on its way to a 
summer resort and good cheer was abun- 
dant and expectation ran high. A happy, 
healthy, harmonious family it seemed to be, 
both in quality and in quantity, the kind 
of family that Theodore Roosevelt would 
approve. 

At a little side table in the same restau- 

[131] 



REAL RELIGION 



rant sat a gentleman and lady watching the 
pretty scene. ^'How jolly they all seem," 
said the gentleman. To which his com- 
panion replied, ^^AU but the father. Do 
you notice how grave he is.'^ And I don't 
wonder. Think of providing bread three 
times a day for those seven hungry people, 
to say nothing about chops. I declare, I 
sometimes marvel at the courage and en- 
durance of the father of a family. Perhaps 
his daily effort with hands or brain is the 
only thing that keeps off starvation from 
those children. And there must be millions 
like him who have the sole responsibility for 
other lives.'' 

Undoubtedly there are. Not only do 
countless fathers win the bread for wives 
and children, but brothers do it for sisters 
and sons for mothers. It has always been 
so since civilization began. One half the 
world carries the other half on its back. 
Socialistic theories break down at this point. 
No reconstruction of society can ever relieve 
the true man of the duty or deprive him of 
the joy of winning the daily bread of those 
dearest to him. This ambition steadies and 
inspires him as he toils all day long at the 
counter or the loom or the anvil or the 
[132] 



HAIL THE BREADWINNER 

bench. Had he no such motive work might 
become unendurable. 

But do those for whom he works always 
appreciate what a load rests upon *' father's" 
shoulders.'^ Is it any wonder that some- 
times his face gets tense and the lines in 
it deepen .^^ These are days of tremendous 
strain and competition in the industrial 
world. Sometimes when a man kisses his 
wife good-bye in the morning he hardly 
knows what will be his fortunes or misfor- 
tunes before he greets her again. Tempta- 
tions, too, confront the business man today 
from dawn till sunset. He is in constant 
danger of becoming mean or sordid or tricky 
or false. He needs, therefore, the apprecia- 
tion and help of those for whose sake alone 
he ventures into the difficult and perilous 
places. 

So, then, honor and guard the breadwinner. 
When you get your check at the regular time, 
college boy or college girl, don't take it as a 
matter of course, but write a line of gratitude 
to 'Mear old dad." And, you the wife of his 
bosom and the other bairns still in the home 
nest, never let the one who wins for you your 
daily bread go hungry himself for lack of love 
and consideration. 

[133] 



REAL RELIGION 



Happy breadwinner, gifted with the ability 
to provide for the material wants of others! 
May you win their tender love and for your- 
self that pearl of great price, a good name 
and a noble character. 



i 



[134I 



^^FOND OF HIS FOLKS'' 

"TTE'S fond of his folks," said a man to 
JLX me recently concerning a third person 
whom I have never met. This was one of 
several comments passed. What the others 
were I have forgotten. The thing that sticks 
in my mind^ is the fact that this particular 
person likes his own people. That single 
element in his make-up predisposes me in his 
favor. When I meet him I shall expect to 
find a certain kind of man. He may be de- 
fective in other particulars, open to criticism 
because of this or that peculiarity, but he 
cannot be wholly bad and my heart warms 
up to him in advance because he is said to 
possess that quality of loyalty to his friends 
and his family. 

Yet when characterizing a man, why should 
you mention this trait as if it were excep- 
tional, as if only now and then a man or 
woman were found of whom it is true.^ Pray 
of whom should we be fond, if not of our 
own kith and kin.^ Who has done more for 
us than they.^ Who has borne with us more 
patiently in season and out of season, when 

[135] 



REAL RELIGION 



we were worthy of their affection and when 
we were far from worthy of it? Has Tom, 
Dick, or Harry, has your chance acquaint- 
ance on the train or the steamer, has the 
man in the next block done more for you, 
year after year, than your father, your mother, 
your sister, your brother? And, on the whole, 
are there any nicer people to live with or to 
be identified with than just our own dear 
people ? 

Families differ in their possession and exhi- 
bition of this mutual regard. Even within 
the same family circle now and then you find, 
if not a black sheep, at least an ^'off horse" 
who does not pull with the team, who prefers 
to flock by himself. But is there anything 
finer in human life than a united, harmoni- 
ous family, all of whose members are enthu- 
siastic over one another, not blind to one 
another's faults, but quietly proud of the 
family history and traditions, standing by 
one another through thick and thin, never 
ashamed to confess their lineage, doing all 
in their power to strengthen the family ties 
and to give new honor and dignity to the 
family name? 

To be sure this warm family feeling may 
degenerate into clannishness, exclusiveness 

[136] 



"FOND OF HIS FOLKS" 

and feuds with other famihes leading to long- 
continued guerrilla warfare like that which 
sometimes characterizes life in the remote 
southern mountains. But, as a rule, the 
families that care a great deal for them- 
selves are the families that care most about 
other homes, too, and that contribute most 
to the common welfare. 

So here's to the bond that unites us in 
the family life. Let us cherish it not only 
when Old Home Week comes and Thanks- 
giving and the other occasions when we make 
formal pilgrimages to the places where we 
used to live, but all through the year. Let 
us not forget those little courtesies that 
strengthen the family tie and sweeten the 
home relationships. Let us consider it a 
high compliment to have it said of us, "He's 
fond of his own folks." 



[137I 



A HOME-MAKER 

WHEN she passed the other evening 
into the larger life, at the ripe age 
of seventy, the big world hardly noted her 
going, but the little world of which she was 
the center seemed suddenly smaller and 
lonelier, and because her life-story is that of 
a great multitude of God-fearing, self-sacri- 
ficing women whose virtues seldom are pub- 
licly recorded, but whose quiet efficiency 
helps to keep the universe stable, does it 
seem worth while to tell it. 

A home-maker she was more than any- 
thing else from the hour she went as a fair 
young bride to a New England city even 
to the end of her days. The outward habi- 
tation was transferred from time to time, 
but in the numerous migrations East and 
West the home life had under her molding 
touch a quality and a beauty all its own. 
Amid the privations of the frontier the light 
from her lamp of faith and love shone as 
brightly as when she pitched her tent amid 
the refinements of an older civilization. 

She had her full share of human vicissi- 

[138] 



A HOME-MAKER 



tudes, but you knew that whenever or 
wherever you rang her door-bell she would 
greet you with a smile and a warm hand- 
clasp. More than once she quaffed the 
deepest cup of sorrow which a mother can 
put to her lips, but from the heart she could 
say of the baby boys who had passed from 
her sight: 

"Mine in God's gardens run to and fro, 
And that is best." 

As the children who remained grew to 
manhood and womanhood and as new little 
homes began to be made not far away and 
as birdlings came to those new nests her 
heart expanded, too, and the home-making 
instinct found fresh fields for exercise. The 
brides came back to her for counsel with 
reference to their maids and their menus 
and the bridegrooms found in her a ready 
though never an intermeddling confidant. As 
Thanksgiving and Christmas recurred, chil- 
dren and grandchildren, aunts and cousins 
gravitated naturally to the familiar hearth- 
stone where her serene and gracious pres- 
ence dominated and directed every joyous 
reunion. 

But the outgo of her sympathies was not 
limited to the family circle. She served her 

[139] 



REAL RELIGION 



own home all the better because she minis- 
tered directly or indirectly to many another 
home in the community. Her church was 
not only a place where she worshiped her 
God and found nourishment for her best 
life, but it opened to her a door of oppor- 
tunity, and through organizations like the 
King's Daughters she developed the latent 
powers of others, fostered their charitable 
impulses, and set in motion definite agencies 
which are still multiplying and perpetuating 
her influence. 

A modest home was hers, with comfort 
enough, but with few tokens of affluence. 
She knew how to make a little go a long 
way. She respected learning and letters 
and had a keen desire to keep pace with 
the best thoughts of the world. She cov- 
eted for her children the opportunities of 
college and of travel. She imposed no 
fetters upon their own broadening ideas, 
though they knew what "Mother's Bible" 
meant to her and at what fountains she 
daily fed her own strength. There was, 
too, an ample place in that home for the 
element of fun. She had herself the merry 
spirit that doeth good like medicine. Only 
that and the grace of God would have 

[ 140 1 



, A HOME-MAKER 

enabled her to bear the hardships and dis- 
appointments that were her portion. 

She was not a perfect woman and as I 
have already intimated she was not an ex- 
ceptional woman. Had she been the latter, 
you would have read about her in The 
Social Settlement Tidings or in The Club 
Woman^s Weekly or in the Daily Tell-It- 
AIL She was just a plain, ordinary home- 
maker — nothing more, nothing less. She 
knew how to make a home to perfection. 
That was a large enough sphere for her. 
It offered as big a fulcrum as she wanted 
for helping to lift the world. Nor was her 
life all outgo. Great as is her reward to- 
day in the heavenly existence, she received 
while here no meager returns for what she 
gave. The experiences of wifehood and 
motherhood, a half century of home build- 
ing, an abounding good-will to others reach- 
ing from her nearest neighbors to the ends 
of the earth — all these yielded their rich 
fruitage in character. And what career is 
there that offers to consecrated womanhood 
today larger opportunities and rewards than 
the good, old-fashioned vocation of wife, 
mother, and home-maker.^ 

[141] 



WHAT SHALL THE MIDDLE-AGED 

MAN DO? 

THAT brilliant Scotch writer, Ian Mac- 
laren, the author of the famous 
Bonnie Brier Bush stories, wrote, a few 
years ago, an article with the striking cap- 
tion, ^' Shall We Shoot the Old Minister?" 
In it he set forth the pitiable plight of 
many preachers who find themselves not 
wanted by churches after they have passed 
the dead-line of fifty. He offered the humor- 
ous suggestion that the only thing to do for 
these worn-out servants of the Lord is to take 
them out and shoot them. 

But the distress today is hardly less among 
a large number of persons in middle life than 
it is with those whose heads are white with 
the snows of many winters. Moreover, it 
is not the ministerial class only which suffers, 
but in other professions, and notably in busi- 
ness, the young, hustling, well-equipped fel- 
lows fresh from colleges and the schools of 
technology are shouldering the older genera- 
tion to the rear. ''There is not much chance 
in business today for a man who has passed 
[142] 



MIDDLE-AGED MAN DO? 

forty," said one not long ago, who had been 
thrown out of a remunerative place by a 
consolidation of banks and who had knocked 
in vain at the door of other possible oppor- 
tunities. As business becomes more highly 
organized and power is concentrated in the 
hands of a few, there is less chance for a 
man to wedge his way in after the dew of 
youth has gone, unless he has a pull with 
the higher powers or possesses special apti- 
tudes. 

And even to men who are not themselves 
the victims of sudden reverses, the coming 
of the middle-age period brings with it 
often a sense of depression and foreboding. 
They realize how swiftly time flies and how 
few years remain in which their powers 
will be adequate to the difficult task of 
breadwinning. They see the prizes of life 
snapped up by men ten or fifteen years 
their juniors and they are filled with appre- 
hension with regard to what the morrow 
may bring forth. 

Now there are three sharp, clear messages 
to speak to the army of timid or discouraged 
men in middle life. The first is, don't lose 
your grip. The minute that goes, you are 
on the downward slope. Hold on to your- 

[143] 



REAL RELIGION 



self at every hazard, to your courage, your 
enthusiasm, your buoyancy of spirit. Resolve 
that, come what may, hardships, reverses, dis- 
appointments, your spirit shall not be crushed 
or embittered. 

Next, do not slacken your efforts. Here is 
where so many make a fatal mistake. They 
reason that because they are somewhat handi- 
capped by their age they will never amount 
to much and so they grow careless and inert. 
They do not exhaust every opportunity for 
personal culture. They do not make every 
effort possible to better their condition. Call 
to mind men who have gone on into middle 
life and advancing years, pushing harder all 
the time, never relaxing in a single particu- 
lar. For that reason they are not today 
stranded and disheartened. 

In the third place, and most important of 
all, hold on to faith. "Never despair," said 
Phillips Brooks, "of a world over which God 
reigns." Trust the future instead of fearing 
it. Believe that it holds good for you and 
yours. Things are always happening. Com- 
binations of circumstances are always tak- 
ing place that may issue favorably for you. 
Above all, believe that every human life is 
the plan of the Divine Mind and that there 

[ 144 ] 



MIDDLE-AGED MAN DO? 

is always help for the life that is ready to be 
helped. 

Nothing is more inspiring than to see the 
way in which some men in middle life do 
wake up and register a growth and a capacity 
for achieving things which they did not seem 
to exhibit even when young men. All about 
us are growing, energetic, hopeful, aspiring 
men and women in middle life. They are 
going to do better work as the years go by. 
The world will have a place for them. They 
will be wanted. You may be among that 
number. 



[145] 



THIS NEXT WEEK'S FRIENDLINESS 

I LIKE the grand old Saxon word friendli- 
ness. It carries with it the savor of all 
things sweet and gracious. It stands for that 
delicate touch of life upon life whereby the 
sorrow and woe of the world are assuaged 
and men are lifted into nobleness. I know 
two young children whose one criterion of 
strangers, be they of the human or of the 
brute creation, is, ^'Are they friendly.^" 
That is the first thing they want to find out 
about a new acquaintance and other con- 
siderations take a subordinate place. 

How many persons lack just this crowning 
virtue! They are amiable and respectable. 
They won't lie or steal. But you would 
never think of going to them with your 
burden, and it is diflftcult to imagine them 
interesting themselves in other persons when 
such interest involves any sacrifice of time or 
ease. And we know other persons like the 
late Prof. Henry Drummond, for instance, 
whose very presence radiates friendliness. 
It distils from the tips of their fingers, it 
sounds in the tones of their voices; it seerns 

[ 146 ] 



FRIENDLINESS 



to be the atmosphere by which they are 
constantly surrounded. 

The trouble with non-friendly people is 
not antipathy to their kind, but they have 
walled themselves away from their fellow 
men, and in doing so they have not only 
stopped the flow of good-will from outsiders 
into their own lives, but they have dammed 
the stream of kindness that might otherwise 
issue from them to the refreshment of others. 
You cannot get within a thousand miles of 
the inmost lives of these persons. Even 
with a smiling exterior they constantly dis- 
appoint you and frequently irritate you, for 
you know if you could only once get at them 
their virtue would do you good. But the 
citadel of their hearts can only be carried by 
a long and vigorous assault. You must cross 
the drawbridge and batter down a number 
of heavy doors before you can really get at 
them. 

But friendliness is outgoing and outreach- 
ing. It does not dwell behind barred gates. 
Neither is it officious or inquisitive. It is 
simply the effluence of a spirit sensitive to 
the needs of men, eager to give help and sym- 
pathy. A minister's wife was commended to 
me the other day as possessing in a rare de- 

[147] 



REAL RELIGION 



gree this quality. ^'She is not such a master 
hand at prayer-meetings," said my inform- 
ant, ^^but she does carry on her heart the 
Christian welfare of every person in the 
parish.'^ 

What a change it would make in this big, 
fevered world if friendliness were the char- 
acteristic mark of persons as they met with 
and dealt with one another! The opposite 
attitude is painfully prevalent. We cannot 
remedy the situation all at once, but we can, 
beginning where we are, strive to be friendly, 
the mistress with her cook, the master with 
his coachman, the teacher with his pupil, the 
neighbor with his neighbor, the parent with 
his child and the child with his parent, the 
clerk with his employer and the employer 
with his clerk. 

Only we must plan for it. Why not block 
out the program of the coming week with a 
view to friendliness.^ You can show it in 
places where you have not hitherto conspicu- 
ously displayed it. It may hurt your pride 
to do so and it may call for some heroic 
effort. But you will be rewarded over and 
over again, for it has been well said by a 
sage of former time, "A man to have friends 
must show himself friendly.'' 

[148] 



WHEN IS A MAN OLD? 

WHEN IS a man old? This seems to 
be one of the burning questions of 
the day. The facetious Mrs. Partington an- 
swered it some time ago, by remarking that 
she did not consider any one old until he 
became an octagon or a centurion; or, per- 
chance, might have outlived the use of his 
factories and become idiomatic. The old 
lady got her words badly mixed, as she was 
in the habit of doing; but there was at least 
a glimmer of good sense in what she said. 
If it is true that 

"We live in deeds, not years: in thoughts, not breaths; 
In feelings, not in figures on a dial," 

we have no business to affix the epithet "old" 
to some men because they are forty, or sixty, 
or even eighty. 

Here comes a youth down the street, hardly 
out of his teens. He is faultlessly dressed, 
has the entree of the best clubs and social 
circles, has been abroad several times. You 
would judge from a casual glance at him that 
he was in the heyday of his youth. But wait 

[149] 



REAL RELIGION 



until you know him better. You will find 
that the adjective blase fits him exactly. 
He has been surfeited with the sweets of 
life; he has dipped into everything that is 
going. Alas, he has altogether too much 
knowledge of the seamy side of life; he has 
no ambition and few expectations. 

Here comes another man down the street. 
His head is white with the snows of many 
winters, but his form is erect; his face is 
beaming with kindness and good-will; his 
heart is young. The world opens itself 
freshly to him with each new dawn. He has 
the sense of wonder and anticipation which 
we associate with little children. He has 
had his share of struggle, disappointment, 
and sorrow, but he has kept his faith in 
God and his fellows. Now, why should 
you call him old and the victim of ennui 
young .^ Or, if you would thus characterize 
either, why not specify exactly what you 
mean by the use of terms which, if not clearly 
defined, carry with them an undue measure 
either of commendation or opprobrium. 

What shall we do with the old men.'^ A 

great physician rises up and declares that 

they ought to be retired from responsible 

positions. His dictum starts the pen of the 

[ISO] 



WHEN IS A MAN OLD? 

funny paragraphers the country over, and all 
sorts of methods of disposing of septuagena- 
rians are proposed, ranging from chloroform- 
ing to shooting in cold blood. But when we 
come right down to the serious point of issue, 
we must admit that the increasing valuation 
placed upon young men in business and pro- 
fessional life renders old age a precarious 
season for many of our fellow men. New 
Zealand has met the emergency by its sys- 
tem of old-age pensions. 

Personally, we may have little to do with 
solving this question on its economic side, 
but we ought to maintain the true perspec- 
tive. Old age need not necessarily be a drug 
in the market. Think of the stored-up wis- 
dom and experience in the minds and hearts 
of old men whom you know. Young men 
must fight the battles and do the hard work 
of the world; but their energy and initiative 
need to be balanced by the insight, judg- 
ment, and conservatism of older men. The 
world would swing too far and too rapidly 
toward radicalism were it not for men who 
have been mellowed, ripened, and broadened 
by many years of action. 

But what can the old man do with him- 
self.?^ Well, he cannot begin all at once 

IiSi] 



REAL RELIGION 



when he is sixty or seventy and say, "I 
will have a happy and beautiful old age." 
That desirable status has to be planned for 
in advance. If the advice, "In time of 
peace prepare for war," be worth anything, 
far more valuable is the counsel, "In time of 
youth prepare for age." Lay up the dollars 
if you can, so that you will not be dependent 
upon others; but lay up even more sedulously 
those inward resources which will alone 
make life bearable at that season and make 
your company agreeable to others. You 
don't wish to be in the class of people who 
are not wanted by and by. Look well then 
to your inward resources. See that you 
keep your mental elasticity, your spiritual 
susceptibilities. Add day by day to your 
fund of courage and good cheer. Acquire 
some reserves of faith and hope and love, 
on which you can draw when "the grass- 
hopper becomes a burden." 

In other words, as the body ages, let 
the spirit grow young and strong. There 
are certain preventives against the aging 
of the spirit. A man is as old as he feels 
himself to be in his inmost heart, and not 
a day older. And one of the best safeguards 
against the aging of the soul is to wrap it 

IlS2l 



WHEN IS A MAN OLD ? 

round with a sense of immortality; the sense 
that life here merges sooner or later into 
a life ampler and grander beyond the grave. 
The statistical difference between youth 
and age fades away when we think of the 
years of eternity in comparison with which 
even the longest earthly life is like the swift 
passing of a summer's day. 



[153] 



WHY GO TO CHURCH? 

MOST of the arguments in behalf of 
churchgoing begin at the wrong end 
and pass over the minds and consciences of 
the persons addressed as water slips from a 
duck's back. Of course, there is some force 
in these minor considerations advanced; but 
tell a man that he ought to go for the sake 
of his example, and likely as not he will 
respond: ^'I am just as good already as 
many people who go to church, and I don't 
have to go to church in order to set a good 
example. Besides, I am not particularly 
anxious to pose as an example." Or, plead 
with a man to go in order to help main- 
tain an important institution, and you are 
apt to have this rejoinder: '^Oh, yes! I be- 
lieve churches are good things in their way, 
and that society can't get along without them, 
but I am already supporting the church 
financially. My wife goes and my children 
attend the Sunday-school, and I think I am 
doing my fair share in this way." 

To such a man who parries subsidiary 
arguments, and who in four cases out of 

[154] 



WHY GO TO CHURCH? 

five is a self-centered man, the appeal must 
be based on what seem like purely selfish 
grounds. Go for your own sake, brother. 
In the first place, go in order to have a 
season of quiet where you will not have to 
carry on conversation or to attend to busi- 
ness or household details or skim through 
newspapers. Go in order to give your mind 
a rest from such concerns as engross it during 
the week. I know wearied mothers and 
overworked business and professional men 
who look forward to Sunday morning in 
the sanctuary as a period of profitable mental 
quiet. 

Go to worship your Creator and the Infi- 
nite Father of all mankind. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was not a dreamy pietist or a pro- 
fessional advocate of ecclesiasticism, but he 
said once, ''I have in my heart a little plant 
called reverence. I go to church to have it 
watered." How long is it since you provided 
the proper nourishment for your immortal 
nature; since you lifted your aspiration 
heavenward? The spiritual spark within 
you has a hard struggle to live when you 
overlay and almost smother it with so many 
material concerns. The hour in church once 
a week ofi'ers at least one chance for the 

[155] 



REAL RELIGION 



spiritual in you to assert itself, to move 
outward in reverence, in adoration toward 
that Power which broods over all our lives. 

Go to church to get food for mind and 
soul. A famous Massachusetts lawyer once 
said that it was a mighty poor sermon that 
didn't hit him somewhere. Surely it is 
possible to find amid the diversity of pulpit 
administrations which a modern city oifers 
some prophet or teacher who can interpret 
helpfully to you the problems of life from 
the spiritual standpoint; who can reveal 
the meaning of discipline; who can set you 
to thinking on the great subjects of the 
human soul and its relation to its Maker 
and its fellows. And even if by traveling 
about you do not find the preacher who 
exactly suits you, there can hardly fail 
to be crumbs of instruction and inspiration 
that will fall into your lap if you will but 
listen teachably and regularly. 

You really can't afford to stay away 
from church on your own account. A 
member of the supreme bench in one of our 
great states said in my hearing the other 
day that he had passed through a season in 
earlier years when he pulled away from the 
Church. He thought he could get as much 

[156] 



WHY GO TO CHURCH? 

good by reading books or by wandering 
on pleasant days through the fields. But 
as he continued under this delusion, he said 
he became conscious of a certain moral 
deterioration, and so because he feared that 
his character would degenerate, he resumed 
again the practise of regular churchgoing, 
and has adhered to it faithfully ever since. 
It isn't a question of whether you like 
the building or the people who run the church, 
whether you agree in all the particulars with 
its theology or its ecclesiastical forms. It is 
a question of your own growth in things true, 
beautiful, and of good report. Men put 
forward a multitude of reasons for not 
going to church. I have read carefully 
many explanations of their attitude on the 
part of non-churchgoers, but they all seem to 
me to be excuses and not reasons. Is there 
any real valid reason, my brother, aside 
from ill health or infirmity, why you do not 
go to church? If so, write and tell me. 



[IS7] 



THE QUESTION WHY 

IN one of his sweetest poems, James Russell 
Lowell describes his pitiable loneliness 
when a darling child was taken from him. 
One of the verses in which he voices his 
dissatisfaction with the ordinary explanation 
of trouble is this: 

"Your logic, my friend, is perfect, 
Your moral most drearily true; 
But, since the earth clashed on her coffin, 
I keep hearing that, and not you." 

One has some such feeling as this when 
he reads many of the sermons and articles 
that have sought to interpret the meaning 
of any terrible catastrophe. Most of them 
leave you still asking why, why, why? 

In a group of distinguished scholars a 
conversation once turned upon this question 
of mystery connected with the divine ruler- 
ship of the world. One man after another 
sought to contribute what light he could, 
until it became the turn of the oldest and 
most revered among them, the president 
of a leading theological seminary, to speak. 
All he said was, ''Gentlemen, we might 

[158] 



THE QUESTION WHY 

as well confess that God does a great many 
things that man could not conscientiously 
do." He meant that if a man were in 
charge of the universe, and had all power 
committed to him, he would not permit 
the things to happen that are allowed to 
happen every day. 

For mystery is an every-day affair. If 
we can endure and rise above the mysterious 
dispensations that touch our own lives from 
time to time, we can probably summon up 
enough philosophy to meet the great public 
calamities concerning which the newspapers 
scatter particulars far and wide. We do 
not put the question, "Why," for the first 
time when we read of devastating conflagra- 
tions, of engulfing whirlwinds and merciless 
earthquakes. We put the question, "Why," 
whenever we hear of a fair, innocent, promis- 
ing child taken suddenly, or by the slow 
working of disease, from life; or whenever a 
young man just through his studies, on the 
verge of great usefulness in the world, goes 
insane; or whenever the father and wage- 
earner in a large family dependent upon him 
suffers a maiming accident; or whenever 
sickness or death strikes, as it seems to love 
to do, a shining mark; or whenever tragedy --h^ 

[159] 



REAL RELIGION 



stalks in one form or another into a familiar 
and beloved circle of dear ones. We are 
saying why nearly all the time, if we have 
any degree of sensitiveness to the sorrows, 
the woe, and despair of our fellow men; 
and if we can give an answer to the question 
in one case, we probably can in all. 

But the fact is, there is no answer — at 
least none that entirely resolves the mystery 
or satisfies both the demands of the reason 
and the instincts of the heart. Better 
for us is it to admit that we are in a world 
for whose behavior we are not expected 
to give a totally satisfactory accounting. 
We did not make this world and there are 
limits to our responsibility for it; and yet 
we may be sure of at least three things. 
First, that it is, on the whole, a good world. 
Otherwise the number of suicides would 
exceed the number of those who die a natural 
death. The way in which men cling to 
life, even though they know little but poverty 
and trouble, is proof that the great majority 
of mankind regard life as a boon. 

Another certainty is that human sympathy, 
the best thing that passes between man and 
man, would never exist were it not for trouble 
and sorrow. 

[i6o] 



THE QUESTION WHY 

One more thing is certain — trouble works 
out beneficent results in the field of character, 
provided one does not rebel and complain. 
The world is educated and disciplined by- 
world tragedies. The individual is purified 
and ennobled by bitter experiences. So 
long as the most perfect Character that has 
ever walked this earth was called upon to 
endure the tragedy of the cross, not only at 
the end of his life, but all the way through, 
we who were cast in a lesser mold, who own 
ourselves far from perfection, ought not to 
complain when the knife cuts into our flesh 
or the scourge is laid upon our backs. 

The reason can give no answer to the 
question, ^'Why," but faith, instead of be- 
ing discomfited and vanquished, is braced 
and made more robust by every encounter 
with mystery, for faith takes into account 
two great factors — God and the future 
life. And because it rests profoundly on 
these realities, faith sings on, even though 
the storm may roar without. 



[i6i] 



WHERE DO PEOPLE GO WHEN 
THEY DIE? 

MAMMA, where do people go when 
they die?" This question, which 
springs to the lips of almost every child 
as soon as it begins to think at all, is still 
with us and still unanswered. What would 
not that merchant prince who lost the other 
day the beloved companion of many years 
give for an answer? How quickly and eagerly 
that young mother who has just laid her 
baby away in the grave would fare forth 
across the seas to distant lands if she there 
could find out where her darling is today! 
But no sphinx or oracle discloses the secret. 
And I am not so foolish as to think I can 
give anything like a definite or satisfying 
answer, but certain beliefs, or if you prefer 
to call them hopes, are crystallizing into 
convictions in my mind and they bear upon 
the underlying problem and illuminate it to 
some extent. 

One is that the dead are somewhere. 
The very form of this age-long question 
implies that. One asks instinctively about 

[162] 



WHERE DO PEOPLE GO? 

the person who has just stopped breathing, 
not "Why has he ceased to be?" but '* Where 
has he gone?" That strong, commanding 
spirit who only recently was the most 
vigorous among us must still be somewhere. 
In the early days of this country when people 
emigrated from New England to the distant 
West, relying solely on emigrant wagons, 
their friends who bade them good-bye knew 
that they might not hear from the travelers 
for months, perhaps not for years, but 
they did not on that account think of them 
thereafter as non-existent. The long wait 
for us who have lost friends by death, the 
awful silence seems sometimes unbearable, 
but the greatest wrong we can do ourselves 
or them is to think of them as anything 
but living, growing, developing souls some- 
where in God's universe. 

And they are doubtless better off. The 
apostle Paul thought so, at any rate, and he 
seems to have had special information on 
the matter. When we consider the physical 
and the moral risks to which a human being 
is subject in this imperfect world from 
babyhood to old age, when we reflect upon 
the contagion of disease, the liabilities to 
accident, the inherited maladies, the pitfalls 

[163] 



REAL RELIGION 



in the path of him who would be good, 
when we think of man's inhumanity to man 
and the large domains of life where cruelty, 
tyranny, and lust still hold sway, we can at 
least hope and expect that the "other room" 
into which God takes his children, one by 
one, is free from some of the evils that 
blight this earth and that there the average 
soul is freer, happier, and holier. Certainly 
all the evolutionary processes and tendencies 
at work in this present world look as if they 
made for something better and higher here- 
after. Helen Hunt voiced this faith in the 
sweet poem beginning, 

"Mother, I see you with your nursery light, 
Leading your babies all in white, 

To their sweet rest; 
Christ, the good Shepherd, carries mine to-night. 
And that is best. 

But how about rewards and punishments.'^ 
How about the sharp divisions.^ Well, there 
are divisions here and it is forever true that 
a man to be happy in heaven must have a 
heavenly mind. There is solemn truth in 
the reply which a wise man made to the 
flippant question, "Where does all the sul- 
phur in the infernal regions come from?" 
^'Each man," said he, ^'brings his own." 

[164] 



WHERE DO PEOPLE GO? 

The place where people go when they die 
is determined not by a harsh, powerful 
despot, but by a loving personal will and 
the degree to which a human being has 
brought his life into conformity with it. 



[165] 



THE ONE-LEGGED BOY^S 
THANKFULNESS 

THE Sunday-school teacher thought it 
would be a capital idea on the Sun- 
day before Thanksgiving to ask his class of 
bright boys what each had to be thankful 
for. So he passed around paper and pencils 
and in due time the replies came back. 
One lad was thankful that he had made 
the football team, another for his good home, 
a third for his new bicycle, but the answer 
that touched the teacher most deeply came 
from the one-legged boy in the corner who 
wrote simply, "I am thankful for one good 

leg." 

One good leg! that represented what 
he had saved out of the accident. It was 
more precious to him than his two legs 
had been prior to the time that he fell under 
the train. For with the one leg left to him 
he had been able by sheer pluck, and with 
the aid of a crutch, to get about among his 
mates somewhat as before, to go to school 
again, to have a little share in the sports, to 
[i66] 



THANKFULNESS 



earn a little money. Why, that one leg 
stood in his thought for everything worth 
having! It symbolized independence, educa- 
tion, the power of locomotion, the possibility 
of attaining noble and useful manhood by 
and by. No wonder that he grasped his 
pencil firmly and wrote quickly, ''I am 
thankful for one good leg." 

Who are the happiest people on Thanks- 
giving Day, when the turkey comes steam- 
ing in.^ Not necessarily those who have the 
most abundant menus, the most sumptuous 
homes. The happiest people will be those 
who have learned the real worth of the 
things which they possess. And sometimes 
we have to be deprived of half of our bless- 
ings in order to appreciate the half that 
is left. When satisfactions and delights 
pour in upon us in a golden and continuous 
stream we are liable to accept them as a 
matter of course, to underrate each separate 
mercy, to forget entirely the source of all 
prosperity and happiness. A wealthy man- 
ufacturer was telling me the other day 
how he had lavished gifts and advantages 
upon his two daughters from their childhood 
to their present college days. ''And yet," 
he went on to say, "mother and I sometimes 

[167] 



REAL RELIGION 



think they don't care half so much for a 
diamond necklace even, as she and I, when 
we were young and poor, cared for the trinkets 
given us.'' 

We almost need to lose a leg, some of 
us, to get our eyes open to what it means 
to have a share in the normal, the average 
boons granted to the human family. And 
not every one who loses a leg actually or 
metaphorically takes the deprivation as 
philosophically and cheerfully as this boy 
did. As families gather all over the land 
for the annual festival of Thanksgiving, in 
many a home there will be a vacant chair 
or some other token of loss. But is it the 
hour for mourning over what was and is no 
more, or is it a manlier thing to look about 
and take account over what is left? How 
rich your life still is in friends and kindred, 
in external comfort and ease, in inward 
capacities and hopes, in opportunities for 
retrieving the mistakes of the past and for 
more tender loving of the dear ones whose 
presence still irradiates your home! 

Blessings on thee, thou cheerful, thankful, 

one-legged boy! We will think like you not 

of the things which we have lost or which 

we lack, but of the many mercies still vouch- 

[ i68 ] 



THANKFULNESS 



safed us, and we will join in repeating that 
little stanza of Robert Burns, 

"Some hae meat and canna eat, 
And some wad eat that want it; 
But we hae meat, and we can eat; 
Sae let the Lord be thankit/' 



[169] 



THE GOOD-WILL COMPANY 
UNLIMITED 

WHAT kind of a world would this be if 
the Christmas spirit pervaded fifty- 
two weeks of the year instead of a single 
week or two as at present? We are all 
pretty well disposed toward one another j 
and mankind in general during the holi- 
days. Whether compelled by precedent or 
the prevailing custom or because of the 
good-will resident in our hearts we think of 
the other fellow and spend time, thought, 
and money on him. 

For many people Christmas would cease 
to be Christmas if it meant only getting 
presents from other people. Last Christmas 
I watched two small children as they secreted 
themselves from the rest of the family and 
applied themselves industriously to cutting 
and pasting, to drawing and sewing, all 
for the sake of the people whom they love 
and to whom they wanted to give, by the 
dozen, things that their own little hands 
had made. And these are not exceptional 

I 170] 



GOOD-WILL COMPANY 

children. It is not true that either little 
peoj • or grown-up people are piggish in 
thei ^'sposition, at least the majority of 
them. 

The sweetest of all exhibitions of good- 
will during the Christmas season have been 
those instances of reparation for wrongs 
or hurts inflicted. Christmas ought to be 
the time of all the year when the balm of 
good-will is poured over the sores and gashes 
made either by wilfulness or thoughtlessness. 
We ought not to let the season go by without 
sending some little token, a modest gift, a 
pretty card, a letter that shall assure any 
one from whom we may have become es- 
tranged, if ever so little, that we intend to 
do all in our power to restore the old rela- 
tionship. 

But if good-will at this time triumphs 
over our self-centeredness, why may it not 
be an active force throughout the year.^^ 
It is not so today — the more's the pity! 
You start out in the morning and you cannot 
bank upon other people's thoroughgoing 
good-will toward you. You accost a stranger 
with a polite request for information and 
the chances are only even that he will give 
it graciously and as if it were a privilege 

[171] 



REAL RELIGION 



to him to serve any passer-by. You go 
to the butcher's to buy your dinner or to 
the tailor's to buy your garment and you 
cannot be sure that the man with whom you 
trade is as anxious for you to get a good 
bargain as to make one himself. You meet 
people socially and their polite inquiries as to 
your health may grow out of a deep interest 
in all that affects you or they may be purely 
perfunctory. So all through the day you 
realize that you are in a world where every 
man is first of all looking out for himself and 
for other people only incidentally and infre- 
quently, if at all. 

But picture a world in which there will 
be an unlimited and constantly operating 
supply of good-will. Instead of feeling that 
a good many persons were against you and 
a great many persons indifferent to you, you 
would be gladly conscious that everybody 
was on your side; that, from the newsboy 
up to the millionaire every one with whom 
you might be thrown in contact was ear- 
nestly seeking your welfare. You would be 
living in a world of brothers. You would be 
free from suspicion that any one was trying 
to "do you," or hurt you, and you would 
never lack sympathy and succor. 
[172] 



GOOD-WILL COMPANY 

Won't you take a little stock, yourself, in 
the Good-Will Company, Unlimited? Won't 
you help to translate the angels' song into 
concrete, every-day, far-reaching good-will? 



[173] 



THE MAN WHO CAME BACK 



EASTER is something more than the 
signal of the calendar for the putting 
on of new finery. Easter is something more 
than a joyous springtime festival in honor 
of the return of the flowers and the birds. 
It is something more than the proclama- 
tion to the world of an abstract theory or a 
vague hope of immortality. If Easter meant 
nothing more, the churches would not be 
crowded and there would be no universal 
chorus of rejoicing rolling up to heaven in 
many different languages the world around. 

The heart of Easter is the belief that 
One came back from the dead. Here is 
the ceaseless procession of humanity from 
the creation to the present man going down 
to the grave. They have been dropping, 
they are dropping every minute, every 
second. As we speak these words still 
others have stepped over into the land of 
shadows. And from that bourn no traveler 
e'er returns. No one.^ But this is Easter 
Day and the time of all times to assert that 
some One, out of all the myriads who traveled 

[174] 



MAN WHO CAME BACK 

that solitary and inevitable path, who went 
down into that narrow house appointed for 
all the children of men, some One who died 
as other men die, save that his death was 
more cruel and tragic, came back after a 
sojourn in the grave, the possessor of even 
ampler life than he had before his flesh 
saw corruption. 

Prove it! comes the imperative challenge. 
Nay, exacting critic, do not hold us to 
mathematical demonstration. We cannot 
prove it as we can prove that the three 
angles of a triangle equal two right angles 
or that water is composed of two parts 
hydrogen and one part oxygen. Our argu- 
mentation relates to a realm quite distinct 
from the physical sciences. And it is not 
so much precise logic that tells here as certain 
powerful considerations. If you are willing 
to proceed gently, quietly, realizing that 
the most precious interests of mankind are 
at stake, we believe that you may become 
as sure of the fact that some One once came 
back as you are of the existence of your own 
spirit, of your wife's love for you, of the 
inexorable demands of duty upon your life. 

This much must in candor be conceded, 
that if any life the world has ever known 

[175] 



REAL RELIGION 



deserved to go on after death it was the life 
that so many of us believe did go on. Some- 
how the thought of death seems foreign to 
a nature that had such a genius for life. 
Death might hold it for a few hours, but the 
vital forces must have quickly asserted 
themselves. As the Scripture puts it, ^'It 
was not possible for Him to be holden of 
death." That rich, affluent, radiant life, 
at once so human and so divine, would be 
the kind of life for which any reasonable 
God in any rational universe wotild provide 
a practically continuous existence, save for 
that brief experience of death which for 
other purposes of the Divine Mind it was 
necessary for him to undergo. 

Add to this antecedent probability the 
fact that those who once knew him best 
believed, despite their first doubts, that 
he had arisen, the fact that the Christian 
Church and the Christian Sabbath are un- 
deniable monuments of faith in his resurrec- 
tion, and the fact that millions throughout 
these nineteen centuries and millions to- 
day of the truest, noblest souls believe 
that he is alive, and you have another great 
support for your faith that he really did 
come back. 

[176] 



MAN WHO CAME BACK 

This is what makes our Easter glorious. 
It does not explain many things we would like 
to have cleared up — why no other departed 
spirits have ever come^ back, to our certain 
recognition, why we of ordinary mold can 
yet hope to attain a personal resurrection. 
But the sure return of one Man, even though 
it happened nearly two thousand years ago, 
is evidence of the persistence of life after 
death and suggests, if it does not absolutely 
demonstrate, the continuance of all who, 
like him, dwell habitually in the presence 
of God and make it their aim to be well 
pleasing unto him. 



[^77] 



THE CHARM OF THE IMPOSSIBLE 

IT Is such a fine watchword for the begin- 
ning of another twelve months. Would 
that we all could come during the opening 
days of every new year within the influence 
and under the spell of the Impossible! 
What a difference it may make to us and to 
others with whom we shall have to do all 
through this coming year! 

Take it first in the region of individual 
habit. As we look back over our pathway 
thus far we see the wrecks of many good 
resolutions and heroic but spasmodic en- 
deavors. And still, some of the objectionable 
habits against which we have waged fitful 
warfare persist. Indeed, their grip upon 
us may be stronger than a year ago. "I 
can never get rid of it," you say. But 
wouldn't you like to be free.^" "Of course.'' 
Well, then, indulge for a moment in the 
luxury of thinking of the impossible as the 
possible. Act for today, at least, as if you 
were free from your disability, whatever 
it may be — the habit of stooping when 

[178] 



CHARM OF IMPOSSIBLE 

you ought to walk erect, slavery to a cigar 
or a cup of coflFee, procrastination, tardiness, 
censoriousness, despondency, the habit of 
living beyond your^ means, jealousy, envy, 
avariciousness. This is but a partial list of 
the things that are a blemish on character, 
and maybe your particular fault is not 
mentioned, but you know it, or ought to 
know it, and here, at the turning of the year, 
you may decide to make short shrift of it in 
time to come. 

Then there is also for every one of us 
the charm of the fresh endeavor to attain 
heights hitherto unsealed and which seem 
to stretch far up into the clouds. There 
was a bright story in a magazine not long 
ago of a Japanese young man in this country 
who was bent on becoming a musician. 
He had not a particle of native ability and 
the teachers at the Conservatory of Music, 
where he applied for instruction, soon found 
out his limitations and tried to dissuade him, 
but it was no use. He had plenty of money 
and unlimited self-confidence and ambition. 
So, despite rebuffs, he worked away per- 
sistently, cheerfully, and in the long run 
to some good effect. ''What are you going 
to do," asks the author of the story in con- 

[179] 



REAL RELIGION 



elusion, "with a race characterized by this 
indomitable determination?'' 

A young lady applied for a position in 
the office of a friend of mine. He was pleased 
with her and after outlining the duties 
expected she would at once accept, but she 
hesitated, and when he asked why she replied, 
"There does not seem to be anything particu- 
larly hard about the position." Noble souls 
want to throw themselves against the hard, 
the heroic, the impossible propositions in 
the line of personal achievement. 

We should feel the charm of the impossible 
in its relation to the betterment of this world. 
"Oh," you say, "we shall never get rid of 
poverty or sickness or discontent or strife 
between classes and between races. We 
shall never have entire honesty in business 
or peace in every home and heart." A 
counsel of despair is this. Once at a Lake 
Mohonk conference in the interest of op- 
pressed people, some one spoke of a certain 
proposed policy as impossible of realization. 
Instantly the late General Armstrong, the 
founder of Hampton Institute, the great 
school for the blacks in Virginia, sprang 
to his feet and said, "What are Christians 
in the world for unless to do the impossible?" 
[i8o] 



CHARM OF IMPOSSIBLE 

Behold, then, on the opening days of 
a new year the beauty, the fascination, 
the glory of the Impossible. For if you 
look at it long enough and steadily enough 
and sympathetically enough, it will melt 
into the Possible and then into the Feasible 
and then, perhaps before this year ends, 
into the Actual. 



[i8i] 



THE MAN YOU MIGHT BE 

MANY men, most men in fact, stop 
just short of being their best selves. 
That is the pathos of human life. We have 
in every community a fair supply of amiable, 
intelligent, interesting, respectable men and 
women. There is a vast deal of kindness 
and of goodness in the world, filtering con- 
stantly from one life to another. But along 
with it we find life after life which just 
fails of attaining its largest development 
and usefulness. One of the most painful 
things I ever heard said about a human 
being was the remark of a keen critic con- 
cerning an attractive and versatile young 
woman that ''she just misses being an 
extremely nice girl." He meant that with 
all her brilliancy and virtue there was the 
absence of a certain, perhaps indefinable, 
but real trait that would have made her a 
charmang and altogether lovable creature. 
The cause of such arrested moral and 
spiritual development is not far to seek. 
Often the secret of it is the comparatively 
low and sordid ends to which a man is 

[182] 



MAN YOU MIGHT BE 

devoting God-given talent and strength. 
In commenting upon a prominent American 
who died not long ago, one of our comic 
papers, noted for its frequent flashes of 
wisdom as well as of wit, said sapiently, 
"He was a first-class man with a second- 
class career." It meant that barring a 
brief but extremely creditable period of 
public service he had given himself to the 
amassing of wealth and to the selfish enjoy- 
ment of it when it was in him to do large 
and chivalrous service for his fellow men, 
to lead some great reform movement in 
politics, to apply his undoubted intellectual 
ability and his rare capacity for influence 
over others to the solution of some of our 
pressing national problems. But he pre- 
ferred the pleasure arising from the manipu- 
lation of great business interests and the 
joys of society and of his clubs. He was 
not quite ready for the moral struggle and 
sacrifice essential to becoming his best 
possible self. 

On the other hand, it is reassuring to see 
how men both in public and in private life, 
instead of deteriorating as they age, actually 
grow better. A prominent minister who at- 
tended a while ago the twenty-fifth reunion 

[ 183 ] 



REAL RELIGION 



of his college class told me that the thing 
which impressed him most was the fact that 
almost every one of his classmates seemed to 
have improved in the quarter of a century 
since graduation. The same process may 
occasionally be observed in the political 
realm. 

No one becomes his best self unless he feels 
upon his life the push of some great, enno- 
bling force from without. In some cases 
a great and growing sympathy with the 
rightful demands of the wage-earning class 
makes a man cherishing it grow constantly 
nobler to his dying day. To others some 
wrong to be redressed or some worthy 
propaganda is the motive force in the spirit- 
ual advance. And to still others, and there 
is a multitude of these, it is the imperatives, 
the restraints, and the inspirations of religion 
that furnish the impulse to the realizing of 
that which is best in them. 

The man you might be is not so very 
far away from you today. It needs only 
a little more continuous, strenuous endeavor 
to mount up to him. Oh, to have a vision 
of the man we might be, the man we ought 
to be, the man we can be! 



[184] 



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